Nursing Badges and Medals

This is the term used in the United Kingdom for those badges and medals which were issued to Nurses in recognition of educational or professional Attainment.

With the development of Nursing as a recognised profession with set training and standards from the mid 19th century onward, came the need to recognise that training in the form of uniform dress and some sort of badge or adornment.

Florence Nightingale's staff of Nurses at Scutari wore an embroidered sash to identify them as such. After the formation of the Nightingale School of Nursing at St Thomas's Hospital in 1860,similar establishments were rolled out across the united Kingdom during the later part of the 19th Century and some started to award badges and medals to those nurses who had successfully completed a period of training.This custom continued throughout the 20th century and spread across the globe.Nursing badges (or pins in the US) were designed in a range of metals, often with coloured enamels, with designs that often reflected the hospital or community in which the school of Nursing was based.Thus a city or town might have several different badges for their nurses undertaking training, for example General Nursing in Voluntary or Public institutions,Fever Nursing,Paediatric Nursing,Mental or Asylum Nursing, Ophthalmic Nursing,Orthopaedic Nursing as well as District and Private Nursing.In the UK these were widely awarded throughout the 20rth century and especially after the formation of the National Health Service in 1948.They were highly prized by their recipients as a recognition of their training and status and helped to form a bond of loyalty and pride to their training hospitals.With the closure of Hospital based Schools of Nursing and the move to higher education in Colleges and Universities,much of the story of these badges has been lost and today they are widely collected as a symbol of the development of professional Nursing.An ongoing project to record and document the thousands of different badges and medals issued has been undertaken by a band of enthusiasts at www.schoolsofnursing.co.uk .We hope to be able replicate some of those images here.