International Nurses Day

International Nurses Day is a day to celebrate and recognise the vital role that nurses play in all forms of health and social care in the UK and further afield.

The value of nurses is well recognised at Dormy Care. We have qualified nurses working in all our homes and our founder and CEO, Helen Davies-Parsons, is a registered nurse with over 30 years’ experience.

Nursing in its earliest forms can be traced back 2,500 years with many religions and civilisations recognising the role but it wasn’t until the mid-19^th century that the foundations for the profession we see today were laid by the most famous nurse of them all.

International Nurses Day also marks the birth in Italy in 1820 of Florence Nightingale into a well-connected and wealthy British family who named her Florence after the city of her birth.

Florence could have chosen many paths in life but felt a calling to care for the sick. Her extensive education, including her own pioneering understanding of the importance of collecting and analysing data, would lead to a landmark moment in nursing in 1854 when she arrived in Scutari, in modern-day Albania, during the Crimea War.

Initially against the wishes of the male doctors present at the makeshift hospital, Florence and her team of nurses introduced a strict sanitary regime of the regular washing of patients and staff and cleaning of the ward itself, the equipment and rags that were repeatedly used as bandages.

In doing so she halved the death rate and laid the foundation for modern day nursing practice. Her famous quote: “the very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm” would become a guiding principle for the medical profession as a whole.

Over the course of the next 170 years, nursing has become recognised as a profession vital to the welfare of the nation. Typically, a student nurse will study a three-year degree course in one of four categories – adult nursing, child nursing, learning disability nursing or mental health nursing – before qualifying.

There are now over 731,000 nurses registered in the UK, around 90% are female and the vast majority are employed in adult nursing including care homes and communities.

Typically, a nurse will follow a working lifetime of professional development depending on career choices and the continual advancement of medicine, As Florence also once said: “Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.”

At Dormy Care we applaud the dedication of the nurses in our communities and the difference they make to the lives of our residents. We recognise that on May 12, International Nurses Day, and every other day.

It’s been nice to present gifts to all the nurses in our care communities, as well as the residents who used to be nurses during their working lives as well.