Marketing the municipal model: the London County Council Nursing Service recruitment strategies 1930-45.

Municipally administered, with its origins in the Poor Laws, the LCC Nursing Service could be said to have been a Cinderella Service in comparison with the prestigious London voluntary hospitals. This paper analyses the recruitment strategies of the London County Council Nursing Service within the context of the overall national situation during the 1930s and the Second World War. These can be categorised as cosmetic, reactive, innovative and pragmatic. An astute nursing leadership could use the resources of a large municipal authority to challenge the voluntary hospitals in the nursing labour market in the area of acute hospital care. The image of the acute hospitals could be favourably projected; however, local as well as national difficulty persisted in the recruitment of candidates to Cinderella services such as tuberculosis sanatoria.