Editorial: The invaluable gift of nursing
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When people are sick or hurting or injured, they often say they need to see a doctor.
More often, what they get — and need — is a nurse.
A doctor can diagnose and prescribe, but time and attention is spread across a large swath of patients.
A nurse, on the other hand, is the one who makes that diagnosis and direction possible. A nurse lays hands on a patient. A nurse notices when the pain recedes and when it returns, how the skin heats and cools and what makes breath catch and focus waver.
It is tempting to say nurses have never meant more than they do right now, as they hold the line against the coronavirus pandemic. The truth is this is just the most recent example of nurses stepping to the forefront of a crisis.
Sometimes it has been war. The Revolutionary War created the first American nursing jobs. The Civil War, with its blend of shattered bodies and camp-bred sickness, expanded the need. Epidemics like the 1918 flu outbreak demanded even more.
The University of Pittsburgh established its nursing school in 1939, with trustees looking ahead toward the tensions in Europe and Asia that would become a world war. They were prophetic. The first Pitt women were pinned — the nursing equivalent of a graduation cap toss — in 1943, less than two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Nursing led to women joining military service. Nursing led to innovations in how hospital treatment is administered. Nursing created the way we care for our elderly and how people choose their end-of-life options. It affects how people are born, how they raise their children, how life expectancy has lengthened and the way people die.
Today, there are about 3 million registered nurses in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and another 729,000 licensed practical nurses and 1.5 million nursing assistants. That is more than 5 million people doing the critical job of healing, helping and holding hands when there is nothing else to do.
Wednesday is National Nurses Day and the start of National Nurses Week. It should mean something to us every year, because all of the things nurses do are important every single day.
But this year, every nurse who takes a shift in the emergency department is showing up on a battlefield. A CNA in a nursing home takes a risk with every clock-in.
Nurses need to be appreciated and respected for the job they are doing today because we so badly need them to do it.