Material?
Sanitary?
Moral?
Or shall they be restricted either to the first only or the first
and second? Here, again, I submit that we should consult hospital
authorities and a few men of business and of experience, as to the
feasibility, often a distinct thing from desirability, of these things.
Upon the whole, and weighing many opposite difficulties, my impression
is strongly in favour of attempting to combine the three.
Material objects.
[Sidenote: Material Objects to be sought.]
The benefit and provident societies embrace many objects: annuities,
payments on illness, payments at burial, provision for children’s
apprenticeships, provision for children at death, and other things.
[Sidenote: Provision after Superannuation.]
I. It appears to me that the main if not the only object of the Fund
should be to provide annuities.
[Sidenote: During Illness.]
II. It would be a question whether or not to arrange for payments
during illness.[23] Every now and then ward air gets down the throat of
almost every nurse, and every few years or so there is an illness. In
many cases a nurse’s pay stops either when or soon after she becomes
a patient. Some check upon malingering, a thing well known where the
name is not, is essential to every hospital. Of course it presses
heaviest upon those who do not require it. After an illness, before
returning into the wards, the best thing is a short thorough change of
air. Often a severe illness is, and oftener still would be prevented
by a week’s change of air, when the peculiar hospital-languor, so well
known in hospitals, and so indescribable outside of them, first fairly
sets in. The means of change of air, either before or after illness,
are often deficient. Still, useful as some such provision would be,
in many cases every year, it appears to me so subordinate to the
great object of furnishing these women with some provision on their
superannuation, that if it in the least impeded or rendered the latter
less secure, I should unhesitatingly give it up.
[Sidenote: Burial Payments.]