In what is turning out to be a bit of precognition, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared 2020 as the year of the Nurse and the Midwife. While this was originally done in honor of Florence Nightingale, it’s taken on a new meaning with the growing global pandemic caused by the unprecedented spread of the COIVD-19 virus.
Nurses Have Always Been The Front Line
The reason Florance Nightingale is such a big deal in nursing is her groundbreaking work, over a century ago, during the Crimean War. Nightingale realized that more soldiers were dying off the battlefield from infections than on the battlefield from direct combat.
Nightingale helped create and make commonplace many of the life-saving practices we see today. From sanitation standards and procedures to data collection and risk management techniques.
Even in modern nursing, however, there are still many risks and an important reasons today’s nurses have their own professional nursing insurance. Some of the risks nurses face are new to the modern world so they require a modern solution.
It can take a lot of time and effort to become a nurse so nurses should take the time to make sure they covered for unforeseen situations. This way they can have long careers that we all benefit from.
This is Nursing’s Moment
Nurses are everyday heroes and it can be hard to celebrate something that happens every day. Nurses often see people at their worst. They tend to people when they are hurting, scared, or even dying. That’s why it’s important to take a moment, especially if we are lucky enough to be fit and healthy to remember we all will or have already needed a nurse.
It’s also important to remember that nurses are people. People get tired, they make mistakes and sometimes the most important thing we can do is just to remind ourselves to have some forgiveness. For nurses, making sure the company they work for has proper professional nursing insurance coverage will go a long way to helping mitigate the inevitable and understandable human error that exists in every profession.
Supporting Local Nurses
Worldwide there are nurses from different backgrounds, working with different populations, in private and public sectors. From aged care to maternity wards, they are all doing the same taxing, exhausting and rewarding job.
Here in Australia nurses are going to be in high demand and working in dangerous conditions for the rest of 2020. As of the time of writing this the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading in every state.
One of the best ways in 2020 to support local nurses is to make sure we’re doing our part to not overburden the healthcare system. That means, social distancing and making smart choices around your own health and well being.
Small acts of kindness could go a long way to helping. In the time of social distancing, it’s important that we not lose our connections to humanity and the humans who do the hard work in our darkest times.
Final Thoughts
With the medical system on everyone’s mind in 2020, it’s good to remember all the medical advances of the last 150 year and how important nurses like Florance Nightingale have been to achieving them. Nurses continue to be an integral and all too often overlooked part of the world of health care, let’s take many moments in 2020 to support and celebrate them.
