ABSTRACT
This chapter examines nursing education policy-making from 1939 to 1948. It considers the pressures shaping the content, methods and objectives of nurse education during that period. I argue that shifts in nursing education can best be understood in the context of more general changes in health service organisation and funding. Recurrent ‘crises’ in nurse recruitment and preparations for the National Health Service (NHS) of necessity elevated nursing into an issue of the highest priority; experts from education and psychology were invited to join officials and leading nurses in solving the recruitment riddle. It was in this context that one of the most radical critiques of nurse recruitment and education emanated from a psychologist and civil servant, Dr John Cohen.1 The Minority Report (1948), signed by Dr John Cohen and Mr Geoffrey Pyke, was an emphatically personal document recording the authors’ commitment to the integration of health care within wider socio-political and economic changes. It denounced the ‘muddling through’ approach to policy-making and presented a plea for the rational organisation of nursing and health services within a planned economy. Cohen, in particular, used nursing to publicise his views on the methodological weaknesses in health service planning more generally. Indeed, debates about nursing in the early health service prefigured many of the planning problems which were to plague generations of NHS policy-makers.
