Ellen Johanne Broe

Ellen Johanne Broe was born in Horsens, Denmark, on 11 February 1900. She was the daughter of Peter Johannes Broe, a merchant and politician, and his wife Anna Georgiana Cécile de Jonquières. She graduated from the seminarieafdelingen at N. Zahle's School in 1916 and applied to become a nursing student at Bispebjerg Hospital in Copenhagen. She was initially rejected by the head of the program, Charlotte Munck, because she was too young, but she was accepted in 1921 when she was almost 22, the minimum age requirement. She completed her training in 1924 and supplemented it with maternity care at Otto Møller's Birth Clinic. She wanted to travel and saw nursing as a way to do that, so she worked as a private nurse in Morocco, Paris, and the Netherlands, until she returned to Denmark in 1930. ¹ She worked at the tuberculosis station in Copenhagen, where she organized the district nursing service. In 1933, she became the head nurse at the medical department of the new Sundby Hospital, where she collaborated with the physician H.C. Gram, who was also educated in America. They organized the department according to the American model of nursing. In 1935, she was involved in establishing a continuing education program for nurses, especially for health visitors, as a way to reduce infant mortality. The program led to the adoption of a law on the control of morbidity and mortality among children in the first year of life in 1937. The National Board of Health initiated a course for health visitors and for leading and teaching nurses at Aarhus University, which was the precursor of the Danish Nursing School, which opened in 1938. Broe was appointed as one of the teaching leaders, along with Elisabeth Larsen and Ellen Margrethe Schrøder. They were granted a year of study at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York in 1936-37, where Broe studied organization and administration of nursing. She was impressed by the American model of nursing as a study, and tried to implement it in Denmark. ¹² She was the teaching leader until 1958, where she developed the course and wrote and lectured extensively on nursing issues. She also helped draft the minimum curriculum requirements for nursing students in Denmark, which were adopted in 1948. She was active in the International Council of Nurses (ICN), where she served as a consultant for nursing education in developing countries. She also worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as an expert on nursing. She retired in 1960, but continued to be involved in nursing affairs until her death. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1947 and the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1961 for her contributions to nursing excellence. She died in Copenhagen on 24 August 1994. ¹²