Voluntary Aid Detachment

The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) was a voluntary organisation providing auxiliary nursing services, mainly in hospitals, in the United Kingdom and various other countries in the British Empire. The organisation was founded in 1909 with the help of the Red Cross and Order of St. John.

The organisation's most important period of operation was during World War I and World War II. With the outbreak of the First World War, nurses were in short supply, and the VAD supplemented the work of registered nurses. Although generally looked-down upon by more highly trained nursing staff nurses, they nonetheless provided an invaluable source of aid as war nurses to the war-effort.

Famous VAD nurses included novelist Agatha Christie, writer Vera Brittain, and War Poet May Wedderburn Cannan.

In Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley is a VAD.

Books

 * A VAD in France, Olive Dent, Diggory Press, ISBN 978-1905363094