International Nurses' Day: Celebrating Dedication and Care

“International Nurses’ Day” is observed each year on May 12 to recognize the dedicated selfless care that nurses provide to humanity. The nurses have saved millions of lives and each of us is in some way indebted to them in our lifetime.

“International Nurses’ Day’ is celebrated on the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, the English statistician and founder of modern nursing. The theme for this year’s celebrations is “Nurses: A Voice to Lead – Invest in Nursing and Respect Rights to Secure Global Health”

The day is being observed in all hospitals across the globe. Nursing is an integral part of the healthcare system, so much so that the entire medical profession will collapse without nurses. The roles they play have gained all the more significance especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many nurses sacrificed their lives to take care of positive patients across the world.

A disease as Covid-19, which requires a patient to go into isolation with no direct contact with another human, would not have impossible to manage without the equipped and skilled nursing staff in hospitals. For many the nurses were their only hope, who cared for them, changed their sheets, constantly checked on them for any medical complication and even fed them when they were too weak to eat. Not caring for themselves and even risking infecting their families, these selfless nurses continued to care for such patients round the clock. Such is the dedication of a nurse.

Nursing is a very noble profession and more youngsters should opt for it. Being able to save lives gives one a deep satisfaction that cannot probably be fiund easily.

Hospital across Assam also celebrated the “International Nurses’ Day”, acknowledging the service of the nursing staff. However, it is sad matter that on other days we do not give them their due. The conflict between patients and the medical staff is not new and in the recent years such incidents have been reported from different parts of the state.

Attendants of many patients can be seen verbally abusing and sometimes even thrashing doctors and the nursing staff in hospitals across the state, accusing them of medical negligence. While this may be true in a few cases, many times misunderstandings between the public and the medical staff is what result in such conflicts.

Another factor that needs to be addressed is a serious dearth of nurses in hospitals in the state. In an ideal situation a nurse should be attending to four five patients. However, a single nurse is entrusted with the duty of taking care of more than 20 patients. As such they are overburdened with work and this compromises the quality of care they provide to patients.

The Assam government is no doubt building several medical colleges to strengthen the state’s healthcare system, but at the same time it also has to ensure that these hospitals have the required manpower in the form of doctors, nurses, paramedics and technical staff so that superior quality of healthcare is accorded to patients arriving here for treatment.

Meanwhile, the nurses will also have to ensure that they perform their responsibilities diligently so that no patient suffers due to negligence or lack of medical care.

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