Ellen Broe

Ellen Johanne Broe (11 February 1900 – 1 September 1994) was a Danish nurse who spent several decades working and seeking education abroad before returning to Denmark and helping to establish educational and training initiatives in Denmark. She helped draft minimum curriculum requirements for nursing students, as well as continuing education guidelines. She was active in the International Council of Nurses (ICN) and sought to find ways to bring nursing education to developing areas most in need of trained nursing staff. She received the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1961 for her contributions to nursing excellence.

Early life

Ellen Johanne Broe was born on 11 February 1900, in Horsens, Denmark, to Anna (née Raahauge) and Peter Johannes Broe. She was the youngest child in the family, which had three daughters. Her father was a pastor at the local prison. She completed her secondary education at Horsens State School in 1916. Then, because she wanted to travel and she saw nursing as a way to do that, Broe enrolled in a student nursing program at Bispebjerg Hospital in 1919, but was rejected by Charlotte Munck, the head of the program, because she was too young. Broe moved to England, where she had a sister living with her English spouse and remained until 1921, when she was accepted into the program at Bispebjerg now that she was almost 22, the minimum age for admission. She competed her training in 1924.

Career

Broe began her career at Otto Møller's Birth Clinic but, encouraged by Munck, she shortly afterwards took a job as a private nurse with an English family who lived in Morocco. She then worked as a private nurse in Paris and later in the Netherlands. In 1930, she studied and worked at the East Harlem Nursing and Health Service and New York City's Presbyterian Hospital, but had to return to Denmark to care for her father who was ailing. She became head of the briefly and then began working at the Central Tuberculosis Center in Copenhagen. In 1933, Broe became the head nurse at Sundby Hospotal, which had just opened in the Copenhagen district of Sundby, serving there until 1938. During her tenure she helped establish a continuing education curriculum for nurses to help reduce infant mortality. The work was influential and allowed her to take a leave of absence and study nursing organization and administration at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City during the 1936-1937 term, along with Elisabeth Larsen and Ellen Margrethe Schrøder. The curriculum also spurred the adoption of legislation in 1937, titled the ''Law on Control of Morbidity and Mortality'' to establish standards. The National Board of Health created guidelines for teaching nurses at Aarhus University, the leading trainer of nurses until the Danish Nursing School opened in 1938.

Simultaneously, Broe became involved with the Danish Nurses Organisation (). Between 1934 and 1935, she served on the Committee for Additional Training and from 1934 to 1950, worked among others on the Building Committee. From 1938, Broe served on DSR's Teaching Committee and was its chair between 1943 and 1946. The committee task was to propose minimum curriculum for nursing students along with basic educational prerequisites. When Broe returned from study in New York in 1938, she was hired as training manager for the new program offered at Aarhus University to train nurses and senior nurses. It was a twelve-year appointment, marked with three sabbaticals. Broe joined the Danish Florence Nightingale Committee and the Nurses' Cooperative of Nordic Countries () in 1940 and increasingly sought international cooperation in developing nursing standards. Between April and May 1945, Broe worked at the Padborg

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