This year, 2020, is designated the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife (World Health Organization (WHO), and the bicentenary of the birth of nursing icon, Florence Nightingale, on 12 May. In addition, a global awareness of the value of nurses has been emerging through the Nursing Now campaign.
On 7 April 2020, the WHO published evidence-based reports that inform regional, national, and international policy on investment in nursing and midwifery. Yet the world's 28 million nurses, representing 59% of all health workers, who were overstretched before the pandemic, have established and fortified their significance in the current emergency far better than any report could convey. They have demonstrated their fundamental role in protecting and caring for people and saving lives, while often placing themselves at personal risk. The Royal College of Nursing (2020) advises: ‘Staff who may be required to deliver clinical care to affected patients should … be provided with training and information on any additional infection prevention and control measures needed to work in such environments including the safe donning and removal of PPE’. However, the reported global shortages of PPE leave ‘doctors, nurses and other frontline workers dangerously ill-equipped to care for COVID-19 patients' (WHO, 2020). All nurses must be adequately trained in pandemic practice and should have the appropriate equipment and protection to do their jobs.
Florence Nightingale is remembered for organising care for wounded soldiers and training nurses during the Crimean War in trying conditions. Indeed, the spirit of her bicentenary is an inevitable presence throughout this pandemic, a reminder of the prominence of nurses through history. The cancelled celebrations that were to mark the 200-year anniversary of her birth have taken on a new hue, but are we paying attention?
To mark the centenary of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the Florence Nightingale Museum created an immersive exhibition, telling the story of the ‘deadliest pandemic in history’ through experiences of the people who lived through it. Reading their stories and transposing ‘COVID-19’ for ‘Spanish flu’ makes for analogous reading and illustrates the powerful universality of the lives of nurses through history.
Undeniably, the bicentenary commemorations have been surpassed by the irony of the creation of temporary coronavirus NHS facilities across the country named Nightingale Hospitals, which unquestionably places Florence Nightingale's name on everyone's lips. Perhaps it now seems too frivolous a bequest for her life to be recollected by the Robert Myers garden planned for this year's now cancelled Chelsea Flower show. The design was to depict a courtyard garden for a new hospital, including plants found in Florence Nightingale's pressed flower collection and plants with healing properties used in the 19th century and in medicine today.
Nurses today, as in Florence Nightingale's lifetime, have been propelled into the frontline, this time in the fight against the COVID-19. Barbara Stilwell (2019), executive director of Nursing Now, reminds us of how many nurses across the world continue to face significant pressures, often receiving low pay and dealing with poor working conditions. The pandemic, the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife and the Florence Nightingale bicentenary should make for a powerful combination of forces to secure a future for nurses in the consciences of people worldwide.
As we look toward International Nurses Day, The International Council of Nurses has, with unexplainable foresight, designated the theme for 2020 as ‘nursing the world to health’, with a focus on the ‘true value of nurses to the people of the world’. Whether it is leading services, caring for patients and coping with the stress and distress of surges of deaths, or adapting and responding to new demands of nurse education, nurses have shown resilience and have risen to the challenges of this pandemic. Yet, nurses are ‘real’ people. They, too, are frightened of the unknown and the aftermath of COVID-19, for themselves, their families and friends, for colleagues and patients.
Will the world live up to the commitment to value nurses for their labours in ‘nursing the world to health’, or will their work be forgotten when the immediacy of the pandemic is over?