International Nurses Day: Celebrating Nurses’ Selfless Service

Nurses are the healthcare system’s backbone. We can’t imagine how our healthcare system would function in the face of the present pandemic without empathetic nurses. A nurse’s responsibilities extend much beyond those of a physician. As careers and healthcare professionals, they take on so many varied duties that it’s difficult to lump them all together under one job description.

Today is International Nurses Day.

International Nurses Day, or IND, is a worldwide commemoration of these selfless careers. Nurses’ Day has a lengthy history extending back to the late 1800s, when “The Lady with the Lamp” — or Florence Nightingale — founded modern nursing.

By caring for wounded troops, Nightingale and her colleagues lowered the death rate in the Crimean War from 42% to 2%, setting the basis for modern-day nursing. Since then, the 12th of May has been designated as International Council of Nurses (ICN) Day to honour the selfless efforts of nurses worldwide.

Nurses are the foundation of medical treatment.

Doctors diagnose patients, administer medications, and perform procedures, yet their jobs would be impossible to do without the assistance of nurses. Daily, nurses face danger and act as first responders. working with patients and saving lives.

They are the driving force behind providing pre-and post-operative care, monitoring medication doses and intravenous infusions, and collecting patient samples such as temperatures, blood pressures, and pulses. They repair wounds and, in many situations, provide round-the-clock care to critically ill patients.