The University School of Nursing in Concepcion.

BRINGING the "new nursing" to Chile began in 1942, when the Rockefeller Foundation arrived in this country in the persons of Dr. Lewis Wendell Hackett and Elizabeth Tennant. They thought nursing needed help if it was to do its part of the job of solving the health problems of the country. A first group of Chilean nurses were sent to Canada and the United States, and more of them followed after that. This handful of nurses, imbued with new ideas, constituted the Educational Committee of the Chilean Nurses Association. In 1947 the health authorities decided that the need for more nurses should be met by founding another school of nursing in the southern part of the country, in the city of Concepcion, and we were called on to do it. This was our chance to try out these ideas and put them to work. We knew it meant breaking down prejudices and old-fashioned molds, shaping new concepts, and taking nursing out of sickness into health. For a year, day after day, we worked on a new curriculum to integrate the social and health aspects and public health nursing in the basic nursing program. This, of course, is no new idea to our neighbors in the Northern Hemisphere, but it was quite a new departure in nursing education in Chile. The plan until then had been the classic three-year program which was offered to students who were preparing to work in hospitals. At the end of this period they received a diploma in nursing from the University of Chile, which grants diplomas to the graduates of all schools of nursing in Chile. Grad-