When I was in the hospital recently to give birth to my daughter, I saw my doctors briefly during their rounds, but it was the nurses and nurse midwives who primarily cared for me. So when I read in a recent Inside Stanford Medicine feature story that 50 years ago, nurses weren’t even allowed to perform tasks like start IVs, I was shocked.
In the 1960s, Stanford was home to one of the earliest coronary care units, led by Alfred Spivack, MD. Spivack taught the nurses working on the unit to take on tasks that were, at the time, mainly done by physicians. Joan Fair, PhD, RN, who was one of the unit’s original nurses and is now a cardiovascular researcher, recalls:
“Some doctors were totally against nurses doing these kinds of things... It also took time for some doctors to accept our opinions about how their patients were doing, or if we saw a problem and called them and asked them to take a different line of treatment.”
Joan Mersch, MSN, the unit's former nurse coordinator, described in the piece how beneficial this extra training was to patients. “When you know how to read electrocardiograms, recognize lethal cardiac rhythms, perform resuscitation and defibrillation — it saves patient lives,” she said. “You understand what needs to be done, and you can take action.”
A big proponent of using technology to improve care, Spivack depended on the nurses to learn how to use the devices and incorporate them in the daily care of patients. And he also encouraged the nurses to pursue their research interests; many, like Fair, went on to obtain graduate degrees.
Last month, almost two dozen former nurses from the unit came together for a dinner celebrating a major gift from Spivack, which will pay for the nurses’ station in the new heart acute care unit when the new adult hospital opens in 2018.
Photo by Steve Fisch
