Faculty of Nursing on the Move: Nursing at the University of Calgary, 1969–2004

Ian W. Toal is a registered nurse in Winnipeg.

For much of nursing history, nurses were trained “on the job,”
initially with individual mentors and later in hospitals. After the
1940s, things began to change. With developments in health care came the
need for more and differently trained nurses. The clinical, hands-on
training supplied by the hospitals needed to be augmented by academic
theory. Various models were tried from about 1945 to the mid-1960s, at
which point a hybrid system of nursing education was developed, with
nurses being trained in both community colleges and universities.
Partnerships were made with local health-care facilities to provide
opportunities for clinical teaching. The University of Calgary was one
of the Canadian universities to develop a Faculty of Nursing, and this
book is the history of that faculty.

The author writes in a fairly clear way, but there is a good deal of
academic nursing jargon contained in the text. Some knowledge of nursing
theory and concepts would facilitate understanding of parts of the book.
All in all, Faculty of Nursing on the Move is an admirable work, but its
appeal will probably be limited to readers with some connection to the U
of C Faculty of Nursing in particular or to nursing education in
general.