Year: 2005
Location: Canmore
Profile: Toronto-born Jean Shafto graduated as a nurse in 1944. After one year as a nurse in Toronto, she became a nurse at the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital where she worked off and on for 20 years. She also nursed in Calgary for two years. After doing post-graduate studies in psychiatric nursing, Shafto worked in mental health from 1976 to 1979. She did not nurse actively after 1980.
Shafto recalls the period when earning one’s cap, black stripes, and black stockings were part of a “rather cruel, very army-like” set of protocols for nurses. In her early years in Banff, the hospital had an iron lung for polio patients, and served as an arthritic sanatorium before the development of cortisone. Shafto comments that in the period before medicare, some doctors would hesitate to make a house visit to low-income patients whom the physicians feared would not be able to pay for the house call. Some patients “paid in coal or bread or services.” With memories of those hard times, Shafto decries the cuts that were made to medicare in the 1990s and their detrimental impact on nurses and patients alike.
Keywords: Arthritic sanatorium; Banff Mineral Springs Hospital; Caps and stripes for nurses; Iron lung; Medical practice before medicare; Polio; Psychiatric nursing.
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See also: United Nurses of Alberta; Women and Work in Alberta