May 6th-12th is National Nurses Week. Florence Nightingale was the founder of modern nursing. She was an English social reformer. She became prominent while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organized care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She was born on May 12, 1820. That is why Nurses’ Day is celebrated May 12th annually to mark her birthday.

The theme of this year’s International Nurses Day is “Our Nurses. Our Future”. According to the President of International Council of Nurses, Dr Pamela Cipriano, “Our Nurses. Our Future’ sets out what ICN wants for nursing in the future in order to address the global health challenges and improve global health for all. We need to learn from the lessons of the pandemic and translate these into actions for the future that ensure nurses are protected, respected and valued.”

Nurses play vital role not only in the hospital setting but also in the society at large. They are believed to be the most caring profession in the world. Some hospitals, like small clinics, may do without doctors but I doubt if they can do without nurses. Nurses provide care and at times medical treatment to human beings from birth to the end of their lives. Hence, the first and last care one gets here on earth is usually from nurses.

Caregivers like nurses are often the most neglected people in the society. People look unto them for care not minding their health and welfare conditions. To mark this year’s Nurses Day I interviewed two prominent nurses, one within Nigeria and one abroad, to know some of the challenges they are facing as nurses.

Emmanuella Ogbegbor, a Chief Nursing Officer at the Irrua Specialist Hospital, described nursing as a vocation. She went into nursing because of her passion to care for people and to save lives. Some of the challenges facing the nurses here in Nigeria include lack of manpower – most nurses, according to her, are travelling out of the country for greener pastures. Other challenges include long shift and physical demand such as lifting of patients and heavy equipment, exposure to illness and chemicals, insults and violence from patients and their relatives, emotional involvement in the care of patients, unpredictable work shift which makes it very difficult for one to plan her personal life.

Dorothy Edet is a Trained Nurse (LPN) working in the United States of America as an Agency Staff. According to her, “I chose geriatric nursing because aging is the final stage of life. This set of the population should be cared for. Serving as a geriatric nurse offers me the opportunity to care for the elderly ones, which has been my childhood dream.

“The main challenge we have here is to ensure the needs of our patients are met promptly. And we must ensure that our patients are comfortable. We are so absorbed in our work that in most cases we may not have time to take care of ourselves.”

Is this not enough reason why we should celebrate nurses? We need to give honour to whom honour is due. Directly or indirectly, we have benefitted from nurses. I wish to use this medium to also appeal to the government and those concerned to ensure that there is adequate manpower and the welfare of nurses should be taken into consideration.

I celebrate all the nurses and caregivers for their service to humanity. Happy International Nurses Day/Week.

*Adizie is a priest of the Catholic Church.