ISLAMABAD: International Nurses Day on Thursday celebrated around the world on May 12 including Pakistan, to commemorate the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s who is widely considered the founder of modern nursing.
The International Council of Nurses commemorates this important day each year with the production and distribution of the International Nurses’ Day (IND) Kit. The IND Kit 2016 contains educational and public information materials for use by nurses everywhere.
The IND, theme for 2016 will be nurses ‘A Force for Change: Improving health systems’ resilience.” The content of this year’s kit, including the poster image are posted here as downloadable documents for use by individual nurses, associations, health ministries and health institutions.
Though mainly planned around May 12 each year, IND activities continue for much of the year by nurses and others. We encourage nurses everywhere to make extended use of the nurses: A Force for Change: Improving health systems’ resilience kit throughout the year, through individual action and group activities.
A day is all about celebrating nurses’ endless contributions to society, take this opportunity to show a nurse who has taken care of you how much you appreciate him or her. As with most gestures of appreciation, whatever you decide to do need not be grand or cost much money.
Wretched as it is, many people neglect to thank their nurses at all, seeing them only as robots who only know how to follow the doctor’s orders, so every little way to say a simple “thank you” will definitely make that nurse’s day. If you are feeling especially grateful for the way a certain nurse took care of you (fed you, brought you a blanket, cleaned your vomit, monitored your vital signs, made sure you were getting the right pills, changed your wound dressings, let you cry on his or her shoulder, or any of the hundreds of other things nurses do), today is the day to show that gratitude.
A nurse’s main goal is to help you get through treatment and get better, so just knowing he or she succeeded is a reward in itself. Regrettably, many people seem to think that the most important people in the healthcare system are the doctors, but this is simply not true. Nurses play a key role in all of our medical institutions, being responsible for the welfare, safety and recovery of patients.
Nurses have an enormous amount of knowledge and many diverse skills they spend years perfecting and developing, all the time working in decidedly tough environments where extreme stress is just a part of the job. Nurses’ help in bringing new life into the world, care tirelessly for the sick and injured, and sometimes watch the patients.
On many occasions, it was a vigilant nurse who noticed a mistake in a doctor’s prescription in time to save someone’s life. Acknowledge the hard work, long hours, and emotional duress that are part of the life of every nurse on International Nurses Day.
