International Nurses Day

Nurses serve humanity by leading the charge for health and wellness among their patients, their families and themselves.  Thank you for being our compassionate and competent caregivers.

International Nurses Day is celebrated on the 12^th May, the birthday of Florence Nightingale, a historical character known around the world as the pioneer of modern nursing.

Florence Nightingale was born in London, England in 1820.  During her illustrious life, she was a statistician, writer and social reformer.  Most of the work she was known for during her lifetime was her published work on medical knowledge, most of which was written in simple English so that the masses could understand it.  Her social reforms included the improvement of healthcare for all sections of British society; advocating better hunger relief in India; helping to abolish prostitution laws that were harsh to women and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the work force.

Florence Nightingale’s most famous contribution came in 1854 when she was deployed to Istanbul to care for British soldiers during the Crimean war.  Upon her and her team’s arrival, they found that medicine was in short supply, hygiene was being neglected and mass infections were common, many of them fatal.  Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for government to assist with a solution to the poor condition of the facilities.  It is asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2% by making improvements to hygiene such as the implementation of handwashing and ventilation improvement.

The Nightingale Fund was established in 1855, receiving a generous number of donations, recognising Nightingale for her work in the war.  She then went on to establish the world’s first scientifically-based nursing school in 1860, the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.