Sure enough, 20th century nurses were exposed to entirely different educational opportunities when compared to today’s nursing education systems. With the rise of 21th century technologies, the way people are treated has changed. Despite the fact that opportunities for nurses to improve their patient education skills were lacking throughout the 20th century, it was during this period that nursing as a whole evolved.

The world wars that the mankind faced over the last century can be noted with reshaping the role of nursing. In fact, the worldwide conflicts created perfect storm driving the continued demand for nurses. The outbreak of hostilities made it necessary for nurses that “currently form the largest sector of health care providers” (Chen, 2010) to obtain specialized skills aimed at providing high quality care to injured soldiers. Consequently, some new fields of healthcare occurred based on the nurses’ knowledge of antiseptics and surgical techniques.

Although delivering care to soldiers during World War II was considered a high-profile job, the nursing profession was not exempt from challenges. In concrete terms, there soon appeared to be less interest among young women to link up their life with nursing, for it was not a well-paid job indeed. Despite nurses’ heroic efforts, the fact remained that they were not given adequate credit for their heroic work. Apart from the aforementioned factors that led people to cast doubts on whether choosing to work as a nurse did make sense, there was debate with regard to the principles that nursing should rest upon.

In sum, there was little room for breakthroughs in nursing education during the 20th century. Notwithstanding this, however, it did not prevent thousands of nurses from being aware of their sense of duty towards their homeland. In other words, education levels did not affect nurses being reluctant to provide treatment to wounded soldiers.