There is a feeling of timelessness about what can be learned of the work nurses have done over the years at Pitt County Memorial Hospital and its predecessor facilities in Pitt County. The feeling comes from the fragmentary information it is possible to gather, full of individual details and descriptions of people who came and went over the years, and places that have been left behind. Yet, the recollections of a group of nine registered nurses who had worked in these facilities provide an insightful look back at how the profession and the hospital changed over the years. Their careers spanned the years 1936 to the present. All but one is retired. Some of them worked in the Johnston Street hospital, almost all worked in the Fifth Street hospital, and several worked in the new PCMH on Stantonsburg Road.

Pitt Community Hospital

From the beginning, the Pitt Community Hospital on Johnston Street had a training school for nurses, and a nurses’ residence at Woodlawn Avenue and Third Street.

The nurses were at least as essential to Pitt Community Hospital as the doctors. The head nurse or day superintendent nurse, Virginia Ives, a graduate nurse, was in charge of the nursing staff and the student nurses. She was assisted by a night superintendent nurse and a surgical nurse superintendent, also graduate nurses. The nurses who worked at the hospital might be called on to do anything that needed doing, pediatric nursing, obstetrical, or surgical.

The Community Hospital nurses made $100 a month in 1945, said Grace Turner, and could stay in the nurses’ home on Woodlawn Avenue. They worked 12-hour shifts, with the privilege of getting two to three hours off during the shift, to rest or take care of some errand, if there were two nurses on duty. On the obstetrical floor (the third floor) usually only a single nurse was on duty. She had to run to the door of the nursery and take a peek as often as she could while she worked across the hall, masked and gowned as for a surgical operation, preparing formula for all the babies. There was no resuscitator in the nursery, so if any infant had trouble breathing, the nurse had to run and administer oxygen. The premature infants’ cribs were provided with plastic oxygen tents that were pulled down about half way when their tiny patients had breathing problems.

PCMH on Fifth Street

At the Fifth Street hospital, a single registered nurse was in charge of each floor, with as many as 30 or 31 patients, depending on whether they had to put beds in the corridors. There usually was no nursing assistant. The charge nurse had to prepare any intravenous solutions that were needed and then gauge the speed at which the solutions were administered, by timing drips. Only in recent years have automatic pumps been available that measure solution flow, and sound out a loud alarm when they deviate too much from the set rate.

In the 1950s, a nurse working in the Fifth Street hospital and living in a duplex on Jarvis Street owned by Dr. Karl Pace, the interim nurses’ residence, made $165 a month. Of this, $10 monthly was for the room, dinner, and lunch each day. There was also taxi fare to and from the hospital. The residence had a housemother and seven to eight nurses living in it, two to a bedroom. They had a small kitchen and a living room, and there was a bathroom in each half of the residence.

When the Nurses’ Home behind the Fifth Street Hospital was finished in the early 1950s at a cost of about $125,000 including furniture and fittings, it provided double rooms for 59 nurses, with a bath shared by each two rooms. There was a separate suite for the supervisor of nurses, with a bedroom, living room, and private bath. There were fewer nurses actually employed than the number provided for, so that most of the residents had private rooms, with a bath shared with only one other nurse. The building had one main lounge and a “dating room” on the first floor, with one room set aside as a recreation room, with card and ping-pong tables, a radio, and a phonograph. Behind the Nurses’ Home were two tennis courts. There was a small kitchen for the nurses to use for parties, snacks, and other recreational affairs. They took their regular meals in the hospital dining room.

Each floor of the hospital had its own kitchen, with a refrigerator to store food items and medicines. A stainless steel ice chest held 30-40 pounds of flaked ice, replenished daily. There was a hotplate and a toaster in each kitchen, and electrical outlets for the hot carts in which meals were brought up from the hospital’s central kitchen.

Phyllis Michalik, later Phyllis Martin, was hired in 1950 as supervisor of nurses, and worked 20 years for Pitt County Memorial before she retired. She came from South Baltimore Hospital, later bringing her sister, Doris Skinner, also a nurse, to Greenville. Skinner worked for three months at the Johnston Street Hospital, then transferred to the new Fifth Street facility.

Mrs. Martin not only supervised the shifts of nurses, but was also a tireless advocate for raising staff standards. She had the responsibility of interviewing, hiring, and firing nurses and nurses’ aides. She also designed a course to instruct designated hospital employees on patient care.

When the hospital recruited her, it got not only a director of nursing, but a totally dedicated practitioner who would often come over from the Nursing Home at 3:00 a. m. to assist in the operating room and check on critically ill patients. She was known as a jack-of-all-trades for being able to repair almost any equipment that was not functioning properly. Having limited clerical staff, she often ran the mimeograph machine in the basement that was used to print nurses’ note sheets and other forms. Since she helped Administrator C.D. Ward with most of the purchasing for the hospital, when she retired he had to hire someone else to take care of it.

In 1961, the nurses were paid $12.50 for an eight-hour shift, said Betty Bailey, raised to $13 after a time. When they were working as supervisors they were paid $1 extra.

There was no pharmacist on duty through the night, so the nurses operated the pharmacy.
Since there was no prepared formula, the nurses at the Fifth Street hospital prepared it a day in advance from powdered goat’s milk for both the newborn nursery—six bottles for full-term neonates and eight bottles for premature infants—and for pediatric patients on the first floor. They had to sterilize all the bottles in the big autoclave that was located in the formula room across the hall from the nursery on the third floor, fill the bottles, and stretch the rubber nipples over them. Each bottle was labeled, and some of the nurses would take the labels home at night and write everything for the next day to stick on the bottles.

The nurses made up sterile water and glucose solutions also, treating the bottles just the same as they did those for formula.

There was no organized policies and procedures manual for treating the babies in the nursery before Hilda Norris arrived in 1965. Dr. Andrew Best had persuaded Mrs. Norris to move from Ahoskie to Greenville by selling her a building lot on the corner lot of Ward and Nash streets for $1. She also married a man who lived in Greenville.

Ms. Martin, who supervised the 50 or so nurses at the Fifth Street hospital, had Nurse Norris write a manual. Prior to that time the usual procedures were written on little pieces of paper tacked to a corkboard, and Mrs. Norris had to copy them off into notebooks—how to take a temperature, feed a baby, burp a baby, perform a circumcision, read a monitor, prepare formula, and all the rest—so that people who came later would know what to do and how to do it.

A particular challenge was dealing with small preemies that had episodes of apnea. They are all now provided with apnea monitors, so that when they stop breathing there is a loud beep that cues the nurse. But in the old hospitals, the nurses had to watch the babies, and if they turned blue stimulate them to begin breathing again. Mrs. Norris devised a simple but effective device that the nurses used. She tied a strip of gauze to the baby’s ankle and hung it through the hole in the crib, so that if breathing stopped, she could pull on the gauze and rouse the baby to breathe. The gauze made it unnecessary to lose precious time in hand washing and possibly be too late to start the baby breathing again.

During the time in the late 1960s when the Fifth Street hospital was suffering from unrelieved growing pains, the nurses worked out ways of taking care of the needs of patients whose beds had to be put in the halls. There would often be five out of 31 patients in the halls, their only privacy being a screen in front of each bed, and a small bedside table. The nurses had to devise a call system so that the patients could reach them when they were needed. They made their rounds more frequently, but this was not enough to ensure that the hall patients were cared for. Hence, they provided each bedside table with a small metal bell so that the patient could call whenever he or she needed assistance. During the night, there would be the frequent ringing of little bells, because there were patients in the hall who could not get to sleep.

PCMH on Stantonsburg Road

When the move to the new PCMH came in 1977, staff nurses had increased in number from about 50 to 77. Fifteen years later, there were 1,200 nurses, providing care to more than 25,000 inpatients annually, and 83,000 people on an emergency or outpatient basis. Before the year 2000 came, the inpatients had increased to over 36,000 and outpatients to 218,000, and were served by more than 1,700 nurses.

There were few, if any, specialists among the nurses at the three Pitt County hospitals before the 1970s, a situation paralleling that across the entire country during the same time period. Up to the late 1950s, most nurses trained in hospitals, and graduated with a diploma that enabled them to register as professional nurses, without college degrees. The growth in the number of hospitals created an expanding demand for nurses. This was not enough to raise their income or prestige, leaving them under all the disadvantages of women workers in a workforce where sex-segregation was virtually universal. Their incomes remained not only lower than those of men with equivalent education, but lower than those of other women in such professions as teaching and social work.

The situation reached a low in the early 1980s, as a result of cost-containment efforts by the federal government and health insurance providers. Hospital nurses were caught in pressures to work even harder than they had been accustomed to, or be laid off. Before the end of the decade, there was a severe shortage of nurses. At PCMH, when Jean Owens was director of nursing, she was unable to get enough nurses from the ECU School of Nursing or from the nursing program she helped start at Pitt Community College, and was forced to recruit from Canada.

The hospital even used billboard advertising, which was odious to many people, but proved very effective in recruiting nurses. Television and the Internet have since been added to the tools of recruitment, and the shortage has been somewhat alleviated. There are still not enough nurses to fill all the open slots, with many of them going into new fields, into independent practice, or highly specialized practice. Recently recruitment has been extended all the way to the Philippines.

On its University Health Systems web page, PCMH now posts opportunities in eight categories of service. One of these, adult medical services, includes all the varieties of medical care provided to adult patients: cardiac medicine, neurology, oncology, gastroenterology, family medicine, and others. The other broad categories are psychiatry, pediatrics, emergency services, and perioperative services to adult patients requiring surgery, cardiac surgery, women’s health, and rehabilitation.

The hospital offers up to $5,000 as a sign-on bonus for certain specialties, pays a generous relocation allowance, and offers competitive salaries. The average annual earnings for hospital staff nurses are in the neighborhood of $40,000.

Only recently, as salaries have begun to compete with those in other professions, men have begun to move into the nursing profession. In 1990, men in nursing were still rare, 19 out of 20 nurses in the United States being women.

Nursing has developed more and more specialized training. Family Nurse Practitioners may obtain the credentials to prescribe medication, diagnose, and serve as the primary caregiver to an entire family. Nurse anesthetists carry out procedures formerly limited to physician anesthesiologists: administer anesthesia, monitor surgical patients’ vital signs, and often advise and help treat cardiopulmonary and respiratory conditions. Other specialized nurses, such as the Certified Nurse Midwives, assume the role that for many years only obstetricians filled, evaluating the conditions of pregnant women, conducting pelvic and breast examinations, and assisting women with labor, childbirth and neonatal care.

While nurses once adhered to strict behavior and dress codes–requiring them to wear dresses with precise hem lengths, starched caps and aprons–most of these codes fell away during the early 1970s. By the 1980s, nurses began adopting slacks and colorful coats. Not only did they free nurses to express their personality through their dress, it also allowed them more ability to move around comfortably and, for women, eliminated the worry of hose, heels and skirts.