The Second “Great Transformation”: Renegotiating Nursing Practice in Ontario, 1945–70
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the period following the Second World War, hospitals in Ontario faced a shortage of nurses that prompted the renegotiation of nursing practice. This article examines the introduction of “certified” nursing assistants, a new category of worker who became the fastest-growing segment of the nursing labour force. Nursing assistants occupied an important position in the reorganization of nursing labour in these years, intentionally positioned between registered nurses and a pool of other support workers, such as practical nurses and ward aides. Nursing assistant training programs were established throughout Ontario and helped to create a credentialed community of practice. From 1946 to 1959, 4,840 nursing assistants were registered in Ontario. Between 1960 and 1966, more than 12,000 nursing assistants were registered, increasing to 17,723 in the final three years of the 1960s. The rapid growth of nursing assistants reveals the extent by which nursing labour in Ontario was reorganized in these years. Importantly, registered nurses were not mere bystanders in this transformation but, rather, effectively managed the critical issue of encroachment, at least for the short term. The system of registration created in Ontario effectively legitimated the participation of registered nurses in the regulation of nursing assistants. Registered nurses also participated in important ways in the governance of nursing assistants, in overseeing education programs, and in supervising the clinical work done by nursing assistants. Finally, the shift toward recognizing “registered nursing assistants” acknowledged that nursing labour was undergoing segmentation, with tasks being divided among different kinds of workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".