General Nursing Council for England and Wales: Registration: The Roll of Nurses

This series contains the Roll of Assistant, later Enrolled Nurses (having only two years' training) compiled by the General Nursing Council for England and Wales under the provisions of the 1973 Nurses Act.

The Roll of Nurses (SENs) was opened in 1944 and is held in this series.

Both male and female assistant nurses are included on the same Roll, but assistant nurses who worked in mental hospitals were not deemed to be eligible for inclusion.

Printed nominal indexes are in DT 11/1-9.

Numerical order of enrolment until 1968. Thereafter the entries were typed.

Topics

Nursing

Applications for admission to the Register of Nurses could be accepted only from properly qualified nurses who had completed a three-year training course. There was a large group of second grade or assistant nurses with two years training who were therefore ineligible for registration. In November 1937, an Interdepartmental Committee on Nursing Services, chaired by the Earl of Athlone, recommended that the assistant nurse should be given a recognized status and placed on a roll under the control of the General Nursing Council. This recommendation was eventually embodied in the Nurses Act 1943 by which the General Nursing Council was to regulate the formation, maintenance and publication of the roll and to establish conditions of admission to and removal from the roll.

Unlike the register, the roll included male and female Assistant nurses on one list from the beginning. There was no provision in the 1943 Act for maintenance of the roll in several parts so that there could be no enrolment of assistant nurses working with mental patients. The Nurses Act 1964 gave the council power to make rules for the enrolment of nurses with experience in psychiatric nursing and two rolls were opened for mental nurses and nurses for the mentally subnormal.

In 1961 it was considered that the use of the term 'Assistant Nurse' was hindering recruitment and the Enrolled Nurses Rules Approval Instrument SI 1961/1519 changed the name to State Enrolled Nurse and the Roll of Assistant Nurses became the Roll of Nurses.