Jean McFarlane was a dynamic teacher of nursing who in the 1960s pioneered the notion that her calling should become an academic discipline. She became in turn Director of Education at the Royal College of Nursing, London, from 1969 to 1971, and then Senior Lecturer in Nursing at Manchester University from 1971 to 1974, rising to Professor and Head of the Department of Nursing at Manchester.
Jean McFarlane was born in Cardiff in 1926, the youngest of five children. She was educated at Howells School in Cardiff. After spending a year studying chemistry at Bedford College for women, in London, she decided to enter the nursing profession.
In 1947 she began nurse training at St Bartholomew’s School of Nursing. But she believed that it was in the community that the greatest differences could be made to people’s lives and so she took further training in midwifery and health visiting. She began to work with the public health section of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), and then trained as a nurse tutor, attending lectures both at the RCN and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She published her first paper — an article in The Lancet on Mantoux testing for tuberculosis — while working as a specialist TB health visitor in Cardiff and West Wales.
In 1960 she was appointed health visitor tutor at the RCN and ran an experimental course that was administered jointly by the RCN and King’s College London. This was the first programme in Britain to prepare students for practice in both hospital and community settings. Students graduated as registered general nurses, district nurses and health visitors.
McFarlane was working for the RCN in Birmingham when, in 1966, she was invited to lead what was to become an avant-garde series of research studies. The work was to be led by the RCN and funded by the Department of Health. Its programme of research was conducted by nurses and focused on the important nursing issues and problems of the day. To appreciate how remarkably innovative this project was, one only has to consider the dearth of research into the practice of nursing in the UK up to that time.
Advertisement
In the 1960s a very small proportion of nurses held degrees, all of which were in sciences or humanities. There were no such things as degrees in nursing; indeed, the idea that “nursing” could be treated as an academic subject was greeted with incredulity by many both within and outside the profession. McFarlane was part of the movement that was to begin to break down these prejudices.
This programme would eventually lead to the groundbreaking series Study of Nursing Care, published at a time when literature on research in nursing was virtually nonexistent. McFarlane and her colleagues were presented with a blank page on which to compose their “masterpiece”. Their project was, in effect, to be the first programme of research by nurses, for nurses about nursing, ever to come out of England. McFarlane’s own contribution to the series of studies — her book, The Proper Study of the Nurse — was both a synthesis of the first six studies, and an eloquent plea for nurses to engage in research on their own practice.
After a year as Director of Education at the RCN, she was invited to become the head of the nursing section of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Manchester. Alwyn Smith, then Head of Department, needed a nurse-academic to lead the process of developing the university’s diploma in community nursing into a degree. The bachelor of nursing programme had been established in 1970 and was the first degree in Britain to take nursing as its primary focus of study.
McFarlane then went on to establish a diploma in advanced nursing studies leading to a master’s degree for qualified nurses. The Manchester University rapidly became the centre of the new and hugely popular concept “nursing process”. Tutors and practitioners from all over the UK came to Manchester to find out about this new approach to nursing care. In 1973 McFarlane was made the first Professor of Nursing in England and the academic discipline of nursing obtained its own department.
McFarlane worked to develop what she saw as an essentially British approach to understanding nursing care. She and her colleagues learnt much from leading American academics of the day, but adapted their knowledge to make it acceptable and useful to practising British nurses, emphasising that any models and theories they adopted must “deliver the goods” in terms of making an observable difference to the patient.
Advertisement
In 1979 Professor McFarlane became Baroness McFarlane of Llandaff, in acknowledgement of her services to the nursing profession and in particular her role on the Royal Commission on the National Health Service. She sat in the House of Lords as a crossbench peer, speaking often in debates particularly on health-related matters in which she was able to draw on her many years of experience of nursing practice, her association with organisations such as St Ann’s Hospice in Greater Manchester and her work with Macmillan nurses and other bodies.
Her approach to nursing was firmly based in her Christian faith that had been a key part of her life. As well as her academic work, she also found time to serve on the Church of England General Synod for a number of years.
She devoted her life to developing nursing as a discipline, always keeping the needs of patients at the centre of her field of vision. Her achievements and the heights she reached did not cause her to lose touch with those she sought to serve. She had a great sense of humour, always being able to see the funny side of a situation and to laugh at herself. This mix of a sharp mind, gentle humour and caring humanity won her many friends from all walks of life.
Baroness McFarlane of Llandaff, nursing teaching pioneer, was born on April 1, 1926. She died on May 13, 2012, aged 86