Nursing schools in brief, and the two-system city

1897 — today

Where the nurses came from: For most of the twentieth century each great hospital trained its own nurses in a three-year diploma school, and the full record of those schools is in the Schools section of this history, cross-referenced here in brief. The oldest was Hope Hospital's training school, begun in 1897 and carried through the Methodist and Parkview names; it moved to English Hall at Randallia in 1953 and closed in 1991, having trained more than 2,404 nurses. St. Joseph's School of Nursing opened in 1918 across the street from the Broadway hospital; its closing year is in open conflict in the sources — the Poor Handmaids' and Wikipedia line gives 1918–1968, while a History Center exhibit account copied by the genealogical society has the program running from 1918, with first graduates in 1921, "until its closure in 1988" — and both dates stand here unsettled. Lutheran's training school became the Lutheran College of Health Professions, which the University of Saint Francis acquired in 1998, ending the era in which a Fort Wayne nurse was made by a hospital. Lutheran's school also holds the record's integration marker: in 1949 it admitted the first Black student nurse in the city. The Irene Byron Tuberculosis Sanatorium, the county's tuberculosis hospital, is cross-referenced here in this one line, as agreed: its institution and its namesake nurse — herself a Hope Hospital graduate — belong to the Epidemics record. What the schools fed was a hospital map that has since consolidated into two systems, and the consolidation can be dated. Parkview, a single Methodist hospital in 1953, incorporated as a system in May 1995 and gathered the region's county hospitals one by one. Lutheran, a church hospital in 1995, was sold that year into the for-profit chain that became Community Health Systems, gathering St. Joseph (1998, to the chain's predecessor) and building Dupont (2001) and Lutheran Downtown (2021) along the way. Between them — Parkview's fifteen hospitals region-wide and Lutheran Health Network under CHS, with the VA medical center and the state institution's closed campus at the edges of the map — the two systems are the whole of modern Fort Wayne hospital care. The present-day map, beds, and employment are carried in the Current record; this section has been their past.

Sources:

1. Schools section of this history — the hospital nursing schools in full: Hope/Parkview 1897–1991 and its 2,404 nurses, English Hall (1953), St. Joseph's school opened 1918, Lutheran's first Black student nurse in 1949 and Mrs. Frank King's 1947 hiring at Methodist.
2. Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ / St. Joseph Hospital (Fort Wayne) institutional line — the St. Joseph School of Nursing as 1918–1968, against the History Center exhibit account copied by ACGSI giving closure in 1988; both carried unsettled.
3. ACGSI / History Center — the Lutheran College of Health Professions acquired by the University of Saint Francis in 1998.
4. Epidemics section of this history — the Irene Byron Sanatorium, cross-referenced in one line by agreement.
5. Parkview Health and Lutheran Health Network fact records, as cited in the entries above — the 1995 system incorporation and the 1995 sale, the two poles of the consolidation.