Fifth ICN Congress Helsinki, Finland

In 1925, the fifth ICN Congress was held in Helsinki, Finland. ICN welcomed more than 2,000 nurses from 35 countries to the Congress. Nina Gage (read more) (an American nurse who was a leading teacher of modern nursing in China), the incoming president, spoke of the need for ICN to throw light on the meaning and effects of good nursing and to learn what political, social, economic, physical and mental factors were influencing good nursing care. She was given the new Watchword, “Service”.

Ethics was the central topic with a discussion on How may we Reach the Best Code of Ethics? Miss Lillian S. Clayton, Superintendent of Nurses, Philadelphia General Hospital presented her view:

“That ethics must, as a subject, be an ever present one in the minds of the entire staff, and students must feel the influence of its continued application to their daily lives.  We must guard against imposing uniform practices on different nations: its traditions, tendencies, and aspirations, its social and religious ideals.” The introduction of the principles of ethics requires a certain unity to be preserved in dominant general ideas and Sister Andrea Arntzen urged the importance of good ethics becoming a habit (ICN 1926).

Presentations in nursing education, the eight-hour day, economic condition of nurses, nursing ethics and cooperation and the exchange of nurses between the northern countries and Europe took place. Resolutions passed included those relating to three years’ training in hospitals of good standing being the minimum required for nursing education and that the nursing profession should aspire to homogeneous improvement of the salaries and working terms for nurses.

The Executive Committee of the Council of Nurse Representatives (CNR) held a meeting after the Congress in the large State Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Halila, which had been placed at the disposal of the Council, by the Finnish Government. During the meetings of the Grand Council, important alterations made to the ICN Constitution provided for a greater number of Standing Committees, thereby permitting a greater, and a more representative, number of nurses to actively assist the work of ICN. (ICN 1926)

Also, of interest during this decade was the annual meeting of the Nurses’ Association of Korea held in 1926 and the Second Pan-American Red Cross Conference in Washington the same year. In 1927, the first meeting of the ICN Board of Directors took place in Geneva

ICN (1926) V Quadrennial Congress Helsingfors, Finland I.C.N. Vol 1, No (4):231) ICN Archives Geneva