The Story of Gail

Gail is a Registered Nursing Assistant (RNA) who worked in Toronto in the late 1950s for the Sick Kids Hospital Country Branch in Thistletown, Ontario. She loved working with the babies located on the upper floor and the older children on the lower floor – boys were on one side and girls on the other. Gail studied nursing after discovering her love of children from her participation with the Kiwanis Club and helping to take kids to camp. Her training took place at a school on the Sick Kids Hospital property, on the second floor of the downtown Toronto Hospital, and in Mount Dennis where they trained in a TB hospital. She and her fellow nurses wore green dresses with white smocks over them and white caps with green trim on them. After Sick Kids, Gail worked at Humber River Regional Hospital in Weston on the maternity floor. Gail thoroughly enjoyed nursing before getting married and having two children of her own – a boy and a girl.

What advice she would give today’s and tomorrow’s nurses: “If you love it, you do it!”