District nursing
In 1859, Sir William Rathbone established the first district nursing service in Liverpool. Trained nurses were generally employed in hospitals or privately, so few were available for district work. In return for providing a nurses’ home for the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, the hospital board agreed to the establishment of an experimental training school for hospital and district nurses in 1861.
Some nursing organisations were of religious origins. The Ranyard Mission or Bible Society began in 1857. From 1868 their ‘Biblewomen nurses’ trained as missionaries, then as nurses including two weeks at a maternity hospital, before being placed in a district.
Eminent nurse Florence Lees produced an influential report on district nursing organisations providing training in London in 1874. Many district nursing associations later became supervised by the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute for Nurses (est 1887). The QVJIN became the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing in 1926 and then the Queen’s Nursing Institute in 1972 as it remains today. Their badge was first awarded in 1890.