In 1896 a series of reports were issued for workhouses all across Ireland, enquiring into the state of the house and the conditions of the pauper ‘inmates’. With most workhouses now over fifty years old and with little renovations or improvements carried out in the intervening years, the report concluded that there was a massive overhaul needed in the management of workhouses. After visiting the Magherafelt workhouse, the reported concluded:
MAGHERAFELT Workhouse Infirmary is the only hospital for the district, and our Commissioner found therefore among the 57 patients in its crowded wards, 33 who were acutely ill, or suffering from severe surgical injuries, such cases as fill the wards of the hospitals supported by the charitable. And to nurse these patients there was one nurse and one probationer, and no one at all at night. These same two women had also charge, of course, of the remaining 24 patients, including the despised ” chronici” (who is always supposed to require no nursing, though often the most afflicted and helpless of humanity) and bedridden old age; and the head nurse is further responsible for the care of 21 idiots and imbeciles. We wonder which to commiserate most, the nurses who are set an impossible task, the happy patients dependent almost entirely on pauper help, or the medical officer responsible for the treatment of serious illness under such circumstances. We know the answer. ‘There is plenty of pauper help, and the poor like to be tended by those of their own class’. This may be true of the individual sick person in his own cottage, nursed by the tender mother or kindly neighbour whose help is prompted by the pure good will which atones at least for lack of skill. But pauper help! These attendants, if able-bodied, are either vicious and degraded, or too dull mentally to make their way in the world, or they are physically disabled in some way, and in any case ignorant and totally without sense of responsibility. The nurse cannot be in all the wards at once to look after her wretched staff even by day, and no one will ever know, though he may dimly guess, how much neglect and petty tyranny, nay actual cruelty, the sick and helpless may suffer at their hands during the night. A hospital without nurses is a place where disease and pain are aggravated by the horror of accumulated suffering, without the alleviation which modern skill can bring to bear. There are surely guardians and ratepayers in Magherafelt who will look into this for themselves, and see that their duty to the sick poor includes nursing as well as the miserable shelter which is all they offer at present. While they are investigating this point, they should also bestow a little attention on matters euphemistically styled sanitary, which appear to be more than usually terrible at Magherafelt; we will not repeat the unsavoury details, but refer our readers to the report itself, trusting that pressure of public opinion may shortly introduce the radical reform which seems urgently called for in the management of this workhouse.
