ABSTRACT
Nightingale’s school of nursing established an apprenticeship system of training. This system of learning ‘on the job’ from experienced practitioners remained essentially unchanged through the introduction of statutory professional regulation in 1911 and the birth of the National Health Service in 1948. Whatever merits apprenticeship has, it fosters an ethos of ritualised practice (Walsh and Ford, 1989; Ford and Walsh, 1994). Towards the end of the twentieth century,
society, governments and the healthcare professions themselves increasingly scrutinised the delivery of health care. This included demands to evaluate whether health care was based on sound principles and evidence (DOH, 1999a). Nurses are now individually professionally accountable for their actions (NMC, 2002a), with a legal duty to base their practice on sound and current evidence (Tingle, 2002a).
