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accept indtBy Manfred jagcrThe first thing Miss Ethel Thorpe, new parsing consultant of the Sanatorium Board of Manitoba will do when she gets a holiday, is to go back to Jamaica and visit with those the worked with for 13 years.Miss Thorpe, matron at 3,200-bed Bellevue Mental Hospital in Kingston until she came to Manitoba this month, thinks she left just at the right moment.“I was one of those who led Jamaica to independence (Au- j gust 8, 1962) after the Colonial Office sent me there to take charge of some of the develop-! ment,” the former British Army lieutenant-colonel and principal matron said in an interview Thursday.“When I knew independence was coming, 1 thought it was my job to eliminate myself and help the Jamaicans to carry on by themselves.“It's like watching children grow. There comes a point where you have to let them carry on after having taught them for a period of time. And if they prove unable to be on their own it means you haven’t done your job properly.”Miss Thorpe says the incidence of mental disease among Jamaica’s 1.8 million people is just about the same as anywhere else in the world. She explains the impressive size of Bellevue Hospital by the fact that it's the only institution of its kind in the island.Miss Thorpe has worked in many corners of the world. She nursed in Iraq, Persia, India, where she opened two hospitals from scratch, Shanghai and Kingston, where it was her job to develop Bellevue into a teaching hospital for nurses and doctors.JamaicansMiss Thorpe’s stay in Jamaica was interrupted from April to August, 1954, when she came to Manitoba to work at Ninette Sanatorium.Coming back to this province this month to serve the .Sanatorium Board’s 1,000-plus patients, Miss Thorpe says:“There is a time in life when you start thinking about sinking your roots somewhere. I fee! this time has come for me and Canada seems a good place to do it in.”The nursing consultant likes this country for its size, beauty, Commonwealth membership and comparative nearness to England, where she last visited two years ago and last resided 23 years ago.Nursing and general hospital care standards — “I have worked more years with physically ill people than in the mental health field” — Miss Thorpe finds high in Manitoba.“If this hospital (the Manitoba Rehabilitation Hospital) sets the standard for the Sanatorium Board then we really have something absolutely excellent,” she says.One of Miss Thorpe's duties as consultant and co-ordinator for five hospitals — the Rehab, Central Tuberculosis Clinic, Ninette Sanatorium, Assiniboine Hospital in Rrandon and Clearwater Lake Hospital in The Pas — will be the supervision of nui s’ training.But she is somewhat set against pure university training of nurses with a certain bedside period at the end of the course.“It has been tried in the United States but failed there,” she says. “But since it is the big controversy here now I think it will lead to some compromise of both university training and bedside practice.”
Newspaper Details
Winnipeg Tribune
Winnipeg, Manitoba, CA
Sat, Mar 30, 1963
Page 26
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 30 Oct 2019
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