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Independent, The (London), Jan
22, 1998 - Obituary "Fifty years ago at the start of the
National Health Service in 1948, she co-authored District Nursing, the
standard textbook on what is now called community nursing - caring for
patients in their own homes - something on which the health service, faced
with ever-rising hospital costs, was to place more and more emphasis.
Significantly it was described as a handbook not only for district nurses but
for "all concerned in the administration of district nursing services". Iris
Irven was named after a warship - HMS Iris - by her naval captain father. On
leaving school she worked as a clerk before training as a nurse at University
College Hospital from 1926 to 1930, as a midwife in 1932 and as a health
visitor, 1934-35. Not for her a hospital career. She wanted to be with
patients and their families in their homes as nurse, midwife and health
visitor educator. Her first management post was as assistant superintendent
of district nursing in Worcester. Her first superintendent's post came in
1939 at Hastings. Organising home care in Hell Fire Corner during the Second
World War, with for a period the imminent threat of invasion and always
bombardment from across the English Channel, was a taxing management
exercise. After the war Irven went in 1948 to Birmingham as senior
superintendent of home nursing. She wrote her textbook with Eleanor Merry,
who was superintendent at the Queen's Nursing Institute. Britain was now
pioneering home nursing in countries under British influence. In 1953 Irven,
then in charge of health visiting in north-west England, was seconded to
Malaya as team supervisor under Lady Edwina Mountbatten's St John's Ambulance
initiative. It was the time of the Communist rebellion. The Communist
leadership, realising her usefulness to the village people and the bad
publicity which would follow if they killed her, sent a message telling her
to mark her vehicle with two large red crosses. They knew how fearless she
was in her health and welfare work in the jungle. Returning to the UK in 1955
as senior assistant superintendent at Rochdale, Irven joined the headquarters
staff of the Queen's Institute of District Nursing. She was seconded once
more - to Kenya - to pioneer a nursing and health care programme based on the
Native Civil Hospital at Embu. She stayed until 1958, when she returned to be
matron of the Soldiers', Sailors' and Airmen's Families Association hospital
at Wimbledon. She was due to retire in 1959 but stayed on until 1961, then
moving to Hanwood near Shrewsbury, where two operations for cancer and a
broken arm failed to stop her work for the Church, which blindness eventually
halted. A keen cyclist, at the age of 82 Iris Irven clocked up 10,000 miles
cycling through the Shropshire lanes and was photographed in the local paper.
She never married. Her father refused her permission to marry her teenage
sweetheart. She never loved anyone else and never forgot him. To the end of
her life his name could move her to tears".
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