Description
Ms. Sloan recalls how the nursing sisters dealt with a severe scarlet fever outbreak amongst the soldiers.
Hallie Sloan
Hallie Sloan was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1920. At age ten, she and her family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Ms. Sloan always had the desire to become a nurse and moved to Vancouver where she obtained a nursing degree at the Vancouver General Hospital. When war was declared she became very anxious to serve her country in the medical field. She decided to join the army. She held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and Matron-in-Chief in the Medical Service, serving in Germany and many parts of Canada. After the war, Hallie continued her nursing career and devoted much of her time towards advocating the vital part that nursing sisters played during wartime service and post-war. Ms. Sloan was the National President of the Nursing Association of Canada (1994-1996) and was active in volunteer work. She has become a strong role model for the Nursing Sisters Association.
Transcript
I think our general nurse’s training prepared us for almost anything that could happen. Now I was astounded in the first few weeks I was in Regina. There was a very bad outbreak of scarlet fever and it got so bad there wasn’t room in the hospital. There were, these were, the hospital was mostly huts that you see, imagine these old huts still left around, but it was too small and so they opened up, put up double deck bunks in the armoury, on the floor of the armoury, and this is were we looked after these people with scarlet fever. Well, I come from a big hospital that had an isolation hospital and we had gowns and soap and water at every door and they were separated. Well, here were all these young guys out on this great big floor in these double decker beds. We had no, we didn’t have any gowns. We didn’t have anything like that. I thought, how, this is awful, you know, to treat people like this, but you know it wasn’t really. They were healthy, they were clean, they got better so fast, which is incredible. You adapt to the situation. That’s for sure and that was one of my early adaptations to looking after a lot of people in a situation that you wouldn’t see in a civilian hospital.