My thoughts on Nurse Appreciation Week

This week is Nurse Appreciation Week, and I wanted to share some thoughts I have on nursing from the viewpoint of someone who has previously worked in healthcare from the pharmacy, nursing home, rehabilitation, and home care standpoint.

First of all, I would like to say that nurses do not and never will get enough credit for all their hard work and time. When it comes to time people have a tendency to feel theirs is of the most value, but what I can tell you is nurses never leave the job. Their patients come home with them every night and they often awake to thoughts of them and their well-being every morning—especially on their days off.

When you are visiting an ill loved one, be it in the hospital or in a facility, you will interact with nurses, and those nurses will probably ask if you want a soda or something to eat. Yes, it is training, but it is taught because the idea of making patients and their loved ones comfortable should be deeply ingrained in every student before they ever stand before a state licensing board.

Nurses spend moments with your loved ones caring for them in the most intimate of ways, inevitably building a trust, a bond with them. For this reason, it’s your nurses who will sit with a dying patient after their shift reading to them or just holding their hand. I have seen families not want to be contacted until a patient dies, while their nurse is seen bawling in hallways for the next week. Sometimes, being a nurse can be emotionally traumatic.

Let’s talk about long hours and holidays. Similar to other professions, nurses are asked to work long hours, usually while doing backbreaking work, as well as holidays. By law, a qualified staff member must always be present at the facility.

Nurses do not get paid enough. They really don’t. Performing a service as valuable and necessary as teachers, for some reason these two professions remain underpaid—and both are also being recognized this week as it is Teacher Appreciation Week.

Nurses are often called upon to act as stand in hostage negotiators. This could be due to a variety of reasons, be it from irate, combative patients to the actions of family members. It is not out of the ordinary for law enforcement backup to be needed.

A first line of defense, nurses deal with the real fear of taking pathogens home to their loved ones or becoming infected and incapacitated themselves. This was never more evident than during the COVID epidemic. And not to belabor a point, but the need for both nursing and teaching was never more perfectly highlighted than during the pandemic, yet strangely, the needle has not moved much across the national board in terms of pay.

For all these reasons, and so many others, if you know anyone in the healthcare industry, or education profession for that matter, make sure and give them some extra special praise this week, they deserve it!