Legacy

National Health Service

Some claim that Nightingale’s success in the Crimean War helped create the National Health Service in 1948. Florence Nightingale pushed “Victorian England into a burst of social progress that may justify a claim that the pioneering National Health Service was born on the floor of the Scutari Barrack Hospital.” -Hugh Small

National Health Service Logo. Tuberous Sclerosis Association.

Modern nurses. © The Student Nurse

Nursing as a Profession

Her success in the Crimean War led to many more opportunities for people to become professional nurses. "Establishing nursing as a separate occupation or profession, parallel to medicine yet independent of and not subordinate to it, was an imperative for Nightingale for several reasons. Women needed careers, with adequate salaries that were sufficient to support dependent children or relatives as well as themselves, job satisfaction and fulfillment." -Lynn McDonald, The Nightingale School

The Crimean War

Nightingale saved the lives of many soldiers in the British Army and improved the conditions of the Scutari Barracks.

"James Robertson photo (1854)" Hugh Small

King's College London

The Florence Nightingale School

Florence Nightingale started a school for training women to become professional nurses. 

Red Cross

Nightingale inspired the founder of the Red Cross.

"1948: Preventing genocide Poland, Second World War. A dormitory in a concentration camp." ICRC

Metropolitan Poor Act

Nightingale wanted a law passed to amend the abuses in the workhouses.  In the law, Nightingale wanted:
"1.  To separate distinctly the sick from the able-bodied and casuals;
 2.  To separate distinctly the permanent invalids and aged from the able-bodied and casuals;
 3. The same as regards children.  Then to provide suburban institutions:  (1) for sick; (2) for infirm, aged and invalids; (3) industrial schools for children."
-Florence Nightingale, Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care
After many attempts at trying to get a bill passed, Gathorne Hardy, the successor of a friend of Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, succeeded with the Metropolitan Poor Act, which addressed some but not all of Nightingale's criteria. 

Nightingale School