[The development of nursing schools in East and West Germany].

Abstract

This study compares the various nursing schools in East and West Germany. In the 1980s and early 1990s the professionalization of nursing was still in its infancy there compared with Anglo-America. There were attempts to professionalize nursing that were meant to enhance the quality of nursing as well as lead to improved working conditions. As part of the political debates in the field after German reunification, the nursing schools in the former east were also affected by reform efforts. From the 1960s, diploma courses in nursing studies and in the teaching of medicine had been offered in the east and, up into the 1990s, these courses were repeatedly modified and adapted to educational requirements. The study also tries to establish the extent to which the academization of nursing in the reunified Germany was driven by the concurrence of the different training routes in West and East. It analyses above all the diverse study syllabi and lengths of training. What also emerged was that, despite all the positive impulses arising from the East German training models, the continuous changes in training in the GDR not only served to improve the nursing qualifications but also to promote identification with the socialist system and its political ideology. In addition, the teaching of theory was never prominent in East German nursing, while, in the west, theory was increasingly asked for and eventually also implemented. The possibility, in the former east, to study the teaching of medicine definitely made an impact on the nursing training in the west after the reunification and the subject is now offered at universities there, too. Despite all that, the concept of "professional nursing," which needs to be practised in a practical, patient-oriented way, and on a scientific basis, is again being discussed since the introduction of Bachelor and Master study courses. The process of professionalizing and academizing the nursing schools and further training courses clearly continues despite the impulses received from the former East Germany.