Post-Nightingale era nurses and their influence on the nursing profession

Florence Nightingale, aided by the resourceful Mrs Sarah Wardroper, the matron of St Thomas's Hospital London, established the first modern secular training school for nurses in 1860. This was soon to be adopted throughout the UK and worldwide. However, despite the success of the Nightingale approach to nurse education and its dissemination to other hospitals, there remained significant variation in both its quality and the length of training offered.

Modern concepts such as the preliminary training school and the block system of study were subsequently introduced by some Nightingale school graduates (disciples) elsewhere, but their adoption was not universal. And, although Nightingale and other emulators developed local hospital registers of nurses they had trained, there remained no national and transparent state-wide register of nurses.

Florence Nightingale undoubtedly was the matriarch of the emerging nursing profession in the early years following the establishment of the Nightingale school of nursing in 1860. By this time, nursing was becoming a respectable profession and a vocation for women.