Nursing Times


Nursing Times is a website and monthly magazine for nurses, which is published in the United Kingdom. It covers original nursing research and best practice for nurses at all stages in their career, as well as daily news, opinion and other information relevant to the nursing profession.
In 2025, Nursing Times ceased it's print edition and went online-only. At that time the magazine had over 20,000 subscribers, with around 100 print-only, 11,900 print and digital, with the rest digital only.

History and profile

Nursing Times is the largest nursing website outside of the US. The majority of articles it publishes are either on nursing news or clinical subjects. For example, it contains a clinical archive of over 5,000 double-blind peer reviewed articles on all aspects of nursing. It also hosts an opinion section, long reads, career development information, clinical supplements and an innovation hub.
In addition, Nursing Times supports continuing professional development and work towards revalidation through its CPD Zone. The zone comprises around 20 user-friendly online learning units on fundamental aspects of nursing, clinical articles with online assessments for bitesize CPD, clinical articles with discussion handouts for participatory CPD, and a personal e-portfolio to store CPD and revalidation evidence.
Founded by Macmillan and Co Ltd, the first edition of Nursing Times was published on Saturday 6 May 1905. The print edition of Nursing Times is currently published on a monthly basis, having been published weekly until January 2017. As well as the 2017 relaunch, Nursing Times underwent a previous major redesign in March 2009.
Nursing Times has regularly run campaigns on issues affecting nurses including most recently Time Out for Training, A Seat on the Board, Speak Out Safely and Covid-19: Are You OK.
In 2018, Nursing Times was inducted into the International Academy of Nursing Editors’ Nursing Journal Hall of Fame. It was named Special Interest Magazine of the Year at the 2019 Periodical Press Association Awards.
From July 2004 to July 2005 Nursing Times sold nearly 72,166 copies. The magazine had a circulation of 30,923 copies in 2008.
It was one of 13 titles acquired from Ascential by Metropolis International in a £23.5m cash deal, announced on 1 June 2017. Metropolis has retained the name emap for its B2B brands business, including Nursing Times.
In April 2023, the Nursing Times Archive was launched, featuring digitised versions of print issues of Nursing Times published between 1905 and 1987.
The Nursing Times brand also produces a range of events and conferences. These include the flagship Nursing Times Awards and Student Nursing Times Awards, which is the only awards to solely recognise nurse education.
The Nursing Times Awards were launched in 1990 and, as of 2021, have 25 categories covering a wide range of nursing specialties from mental health to clinical research.
The Student Nursing Times Awards were launched in 2011 and, as of 2021, have 21 categories for students lecturers, practice supervisors, universities, NHS and private organisations.
Other events include the Nursing Times Workforce Summit & Awards, which was launched in 2018, the Patient Flow Forum, which ran in 2020 and 2021, the Nursing Times Digital Forum and the Nursing Times Clinical Skills Forum, plus regular Nursing Times Careers Live jobs fairs throughout the year and webinars on a range of subjects.

History of ''Nursing Times''

''Nursing Times'' between 1905 and 1910

Nursing Times did not so much burst on the scene as tap on the door and wait to be invited in. Publishing was a genteel business in 1905, and this was very much the tone of the early Nursing Times.
The editor for the first 21 years was Swanhilde Bulan, a German-born journalist. Preferring anonymity, she was never identified on Nursing Times’ pages.
In the first issue, which cost a penny, Ms Bulan emphasised the independence that is still cherished today. There was ‘no shadowy personality “behind” it,’ she said, and Nursing Times would report news without bias. This was an allusion to the fact its competitors promoted particular political views.
A journal that promised to avoid squabbles was an attractive proposition. Responding to critics who suggested that lack of opinion would render Nursing Times ‘colourless’ the launch issue stated: ‘ we can avoid bias, bitterness and personalities, we are well content to be “colourless”.’ However, Nursing TimesNursing Times believed it did have colour to offer, but that would be ‘of the right sort … expert articles, interesting experiences, reliable and exhaustive news, and helpful interchanges of opinion.’ It would also cater for ‘the human being and the woman as well as the nurse’.
From its early years, Nursing Times kept nurses up to date on professional news and clinical issues. It also gave them a forum to express their views. An article in 1908, for example, complained about an aspect of mental health nursing: ‘No duty lays more stress upon the mental nurse than her attendance at the dances organised for patients … Many of the delusions of the insane are of persecutions or of victimisations for which nurses or doctors are blamed, and it is essential that the careful nurse will notice the facial expressions of her charges as a fracas in the ball-room is greatly dreaded.’
The concerns of different branches including district nurses, private nurses, school nurses and fever nurses were reported, including pay and conditions as well as clinical developments. Midwives had their own section. Matters of wider relevance ranged from national news such as the introduction of old age pensions to overseas nursing news. The journal also discussed women’s issues such as women’s role in war and kept a close watch on the progress towards full voting rights for women.
The clinical articles submitted by nurse authors focused on the major health issues of the day. Many of these would be unfamiliar to nurses today, such as infection control in scarlet fever or typhoid, sea-water injection treatment and important points in rectal feeding.
Readers’ wider interests were also catered for with holiday reports, recipes and information on modern hobbies such as photography and cycling.

''Nursing Times'' during 1911–20

Recognising the practical nature of its readers, in 1912 Nursing Times organised one of its earliest competitions – for inventions and ideas. The journal had a stall at the London Nursing and Midwifery Exhibition, on which it planned to display inventions by nurses, midwives, masseuses and health visitors.
In order to attract submissions for the exhibition, it offered prizes for the best entries in two classes. Class I, was for ‘any invention not yet on the market or any clever device or idea’ and had a first prize of £10 and a gold medal, while the first prize for Class II was £5 and a gold medal.
The first congress of the Eugenics Society was held in 1912 with the aim of making the 20th century the one in which the eugenic ideal was accepted as part of the creed of civilisation. A report in Nursing Times pointed out that the subject was of interest to nurses because ‘they have forcibly brought before them in the shape of imbeciles, epileptics and other degenerate children, the result of the mating of the unfit’.
On 8 August 1914, Nursing Times devoted its editorial page to the solemn news that ‘the cloud which has lain over our country for the past week has now burst, and England is at war with Germany’. However, the issue moved briskly on to other important matters with a two-page report on the third annual Nursing Times Lawn Tennis Challenge Cup Competition, in which Guy’s Hospital trounced St Georges by 31 games to 26 in front of at least 500 spectators.
The war quickly became a major concern for Nursing Times, however, when it became apparent that it would not, as generally expected by most of the population, be over by Christmas. Nurses were suddenly thrown in at the deep end caring for air raid casualties at home and servicemen both at home and abroad, and the journal came into its own, supporting readers with clinical information as they struggled to develop new skills to deal with the kinds of major trauma most would never have encountered before.
Advertisers reflected the concerns of the time, with the Boots Pure Drug Company Limited advertising a new treatment for mustard gas burns, which was having ‘remarkable results in hospitals’. During the flu pandemic of 1918-19, help came from a surprising source – Oxo, apparently ‘Fortifies the System against Influenza Infection’.
Even in such serious times, however, Nursing Times never forgot its promise to cater for its readers’ interest as women as well as nurses. Lighter articles during the war years included advice on hair and hats, and advice on how to make a bead bag.

''Nursing Times'' during the 1920s

In the 1920s Nursing Times had changed little since its launch, and provided an eclectic mix of news, clinical information and articles of general interest and kept readers updated on professional issues.
However, true to form, when asked to give a lead in voting for the new council in 1924 it did not recommend individuals. Instead, it advised readers to ‘vote in those classes for the women they consider reliable, courageous and conscientious’.
Most authors were nurses, but doctors did contribute both clinical articles and their ideas on how nurses should conduct themselves. In 1925 George Steele-Perkins advised readers of their shortcomings in an article entitled ‘Nursing don’ts’. Dr Steele had the grace to admit readers may consider him ‘very rude and horrid’, but insisted those who wished to know their faults would not resent him. His main focus was on nurses’ comportment. He wrote: ‘Don’t be untidy… look as clean and pretty as you can… Don’t chatter – all women are born chatterers and therefore you start handicapped – but you are more than women, you are nurses.’
In 1926 Nursing Times became the official journal of the College of Nursing – a relationship that lasted for more than 40 years. The same year saw the departure of editor Swanhilde Bulan after 21 years. Whether the two events are linked is not clear, but Ms Bulan certainly cherished Nursing Times’ independence.
The medical profession in the 1920s was slowly coming to accept that menstruation was not an illness, according to a Nursing Times report of a BMA meeting in Bradford. ‘Not only could baths and exercise be continued with impunity throughout the normal period, but by such a regimen dysmenorrhoea was usually relieved if not dispelled.’
Clinical articles included the treatment of encephalitis lethargica, a disease that had spread around the world leaving patients with a range of neurological symptoms including enduring coma in severe cases. The cause was never established and no further epidemics have been reported.
Nursing Times continued to publish fashion articles alongside its more serious content. We can only hope this did not influence the nurse at ‘a certain Poor Law institution’ who resigned because she objected to her new uniform.
As an editorial commented, ‘To abandon her chosen calling for so frivolous a reason seems to show she had quite failed to grasp that willing response to discipline is an essential duty.’