The Daily Alaska Empire

Woman's Nursing.
(New York Times)

We have become habituated to astronomical figures in association not only with celestial distances and galactic numbers but also with terrestrial expenditures and debts. It is a happy relief to see them applied to a service which is concerned with the health of "countless homes." The National Organization for Public Health Nursing, which is holding its annual meeting and luncheon in New York today, estimates the total number of home visits made by 20,000 public health nurses in one year at 30,000,000 in 1,262 cities, towns, and isolated villages in the United States. As the years multiply, the numbers will indeed become "astronomical."

Hospitals, it is stated, can handle less than 7 per cent of all cases of illness, eighty-six out of every hundred patients being cared for in the home. Increasing hospital provision must be made in the great apartmented and tenemented cities, but the visiting nurse will not be the less needed, for she is both health teacher and health nurse-and incidentally reduces somewhat the overwhelming need for institutional care.

This national organization is especially helpful to the nurses in isolated communities, who, though highly trained, need to be kept in touch with the advances made in the profession. The NOPHN, as it calls itself, has made it its high merciful and practical function to help every community to see that there is no "lack of woman's nursing."