Catalogue description General Nursing Council for England and Wales: Registrar: Correspondence and Papers, Overseas

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Details of DT 18
Reference: DT 18
Title: General Nursing Council for England and Wales: Registrar: Correspondence and Papers, Overseas
Description:

General correspondence with organisations in the Commonwealth and other countries which dealt with the registration of nurses.

The files relate to the mutual recognition of nursing qualifications to enable British nurses to work abroad, and nurses trained overseas to work in Britain.

There are also papers on the approval of individual teaching hospitals abroad, visits by GNC officials abroad and visits to the GNC by overseas officials, and individual applications from nurses to work in Britain and abroad.

In 1974 the GNC decided to discontinue the practice of reviewing and recognising training schools, and to treat all applications individually. This effectively reduced the volume of correspondence as the main raison d'etre for this series was the Registrar to register correspondence on policy, education and examinations. No file continues past 1981, but the Overseas Department holds a fuller parallel series for these later years and files for recent applications from Eastern Bloc countries where no correspondence has taken place with the registration body.

Correspondence in the early years was with the governing and medical bodies of the country concerned (in the very early years through the Dominions, India or Colonial Offices), but the main file for each country consists of correspondence with the Registrar of their nurses' registration body. Other files normally present are general enquiries, reports on visits, correspondence with nurses' associations, correspondence with, and papers on individual hospitals, often in a separate folders, correspondence on and copies of agreements and revised agreements, and copies of overseas nursing legislation, again in a separate folder.
Date: 1920-1981
Arrangement:

The correspondence and papers were gathered into folders by country and were kept in one of two filing cabinets, countries with which agreements either did or did not exist. Countries with a great deal of correspondence had two or three folders. Countries with little correspondence were put into a folder covering a geographical area, such as "Scandinavia" or "Middle East". This led to anomolies, such as Afghanistan in the Far Eastern folder, whilst Saudi Arabia and Fiji each appear in two different folders. A guide to each cabinet was provided (DT/18/716) and an alphabetical card index was also kept. This series has been arranged alphabetically as far as possible, but departures from this order have resulted from the need to keep together the files found in the same geographically arranged, folders.

For Basutoland See Lesotho DT 18/12

For Bechuanaland See Botswana DT 18/6

For Belize See British Honduras DT 18/89

For Bombay See Maharashtra

For Borneo See Brunei DT 18/237

For Canada See Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan

For Ceylon See Sri Lanka DT 18/530

For East Africa See Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda)

For East Pakistan See Bangladesh

For Kiribati See Gilbert and Ellice Islands DT 18/97

For Madras See Tamilnadu DT 18/533

For Mahakoshal See United Provinces DT/573

For Northern Rhodesia See Zambia

For Punjab See Bangladesh, Bengal, India, Pakistan

For Rhodesia See Zimbabwe

For Tuvalu See Gilbert and Ellice Islands
Held by: The National Archives, Kew
Legal status: Not Public Record(s)
Language: English
Physical description: 732 file(s)
Access conditions: Subject to 30 year closure unless otherwise stated
Administrative / biographical background:

The Nurses Registration Act 1919 permitted the General Nursing Council (GNC) to register nurses trained "in any part of His Majesty's dominions outside the United Kingdom," where a similar statutory body existed, which was willing to register English and Welsh nurses reciprocally, and had a similar standard of training and examinations. The only such body at that time was in New Zealand. Accordingly, the GNC entered into correspondence with all the Dominions, India, and many Crown Colonies with the object of encouraging them to set up statutory bodies to register nurses and improve the standards of training and examination to the point where reciprocal agreements could be made.

Two problems, the blanket nature of a reciprocal agreement and the lack of provision for nurses trained in non-Commonwealth countries, were resolved by the Nurses Act 1949, which permitted the GNC to register any nurse trained "in a country or territory outside the United Kingdom" if her training was considered satisfactory, if not, to prescribe extra training and/or examination.

The GNC thereupon re-registered existing agreements and entered into new ones on the basis of recognition of individual training schools; this produced not only correspondence but also yearly updated questionnaires of hospitals and reports on the extensive tours of inspection of Commonwealth countries carried out by the Registrar of the day.

No agreements were made with non-Commonwealth countries, each application being considered individually; the USA correspondence in contrast concerns mostly applications from GNC registered nurses to work in the States.

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