From the Good Life Letter

In a retrospective article published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing in January(3) this year, they concluded that Florence Nightingale’s views on healthcare were more relevant today than ever!

She proved that there were five essentials to optimal healing;

• Pure air: she said that one of the reasons for the high infection rate during the Crimean war was poor ventilation, and now air borne diseases remain a major killer and are the leading cause of deaths worldwide.
• Pure water: Waterborne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid were observed by Nightingale in her writings and sadly they continue to be responsible for many deaths today (1·8 million annually).
• Efficient drainage: You may think that this isn’t so relevant today, and maybe here in the UK it isn’t however a sobering fact is that more people in the world have mobile phones than access to toilets.
• Cleanliness: Nightingale insisted nurses to scrub the ward clean and it is only recently that nurses are beginning to revisit these basic tasks.
• Light: Access to sunlight is key to promoting the production of vitamin D, and as more people lead sedentary lives they are being less exposed to the sun and once again the deficiency condition known as rickets is on the increase.

Amazing isn’t it – all these things were known, documented and recommended at the time of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, when the lives of many of those injured were saved by such common sense approaches to health care.

Yet in this haze of modern technology we seem to have forgotten the very basics.