“100 Years of University Nursing Education”: The Significance of a Baccalaureate Nursing Degree and Its Public Health Origins for Nursing Now

Abstract

The 100-year milestone of university nursing education at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2019 offers a pause for reflection and inquiry. History assists us to illuminate current issues and debates in light of past events. An examination of the legacy of Ethel Johns and others who held the vision of why nursing education should enter the university in 1919 sheds light on its historical significance, then and now. The first director, Ethel Johns, referred to the establishment of the University of British Columbia Department of Nursing and the degree program it offered as “the experiment” (Johns, 1936). Reflections on “the experiment” provides a standpoint to consider how this courageous and visionary leader might have viewed the way “the experiment” is faring within the 21st-century landscape of Canadian university nursing education.

This reflection on the history of university nursing education and its public health origins is all the more pressing in the World Health Organization (WHO) declared International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife and, unprecedented over the last century, the emergence of a global COVID-19 pandemic and related public health crisis. The initiation of university education in 1919 was in part spurred by the influenza epidemic of 1918 amidst a realization of the need for a breadth and depth of nursing education in public health and leadership, which was argued to be best situated within the regular post-secondary education system. We contend that this reflection is once again needed in nursing education programs. We offer a critique of how the pandemic of 2020 can illuminate current shortcomings in the baccalaureate preparation of nurses. The present context of the pandemic might prompt efforts to ensure nursing capacity is sufficient to engage with a public health crisis and provide the leadership—needed now, as it was then.