International Nurses’ Day – 12 May

Senator Máire Devine is a member of

the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association

INTERNATIONAL NURSES’ DAY – 12 May – is an opportunity to acknowledge nurses’ hard work and selfless dedication to their essential roles in our daily lives and their professions between science and humanity.

The theme of this year’s celebration is “Nurses ­– A force4change – A vital resource4health”.

The International Council of Nurses established International Nurses’ Day as 12 May in 1965. American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand nurses have extended this day to a week-long commemoration and celebration.

The purpose of our day is to bring public health into the central spotlight and highlight the vital importance to society of having nurses as leaders for change in public health.

Nurses globally are occupied in pioneering performance on an everyday, 24-hour basis, ensuring positive development in patients and health systems.

Elizabeth O’Farrell

The Florence Nightingale Pledge was universally taken by nurses upon graduation. The birthdate of “The Lady with the Lamp” was 12 May 1820 and during the Crimean War of 1854 she radically cut the death rate of injured soldiers. Her significance may no longer mirror modern contemporary nursing but her dedication, hard work and tuition of fellow nurses set the standards that continue to underpin the practice of present-day nurses.

In Ireland, among others, we have our very own Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell standards to look up to.

She assisted thousands of women giving birth and saw at firsthand the squalor and poverty their babies were delivered into. This was a primary reason for her joining Cumman na mBan, too well aware of the immense inequality and the infant mortality rate in the Dublin slums. She bore witness to the highest rate of infant death in the entire country.

Crisis today

There is a critical nurse undersupply right now and this is predicted to continue for the next 15 years. The combination of increased population and living longer underlines this shortage. Our significant emigration of the past seven years is the primary reason for the shortage. Conservative estimates say that 15,000 nurses have left Ireland to seek opportunities abroad and over 60% of our soon-to-be graduates have been snapped up by health services across the globe.

The shortage of nurses is at crisis proportions.

These shortages were easily foreseeable by previous governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who were so focussed on cutting numbers of public servants that they acted with complete indifference to the forecasted needs of patients and people in need of healthcare.

Those who trained had few choices but to head towards airports to populate the health services of other countries. Those who remained were penalised with pay cuts, temporary and unstable employment and extremely difficult working conditions with their duty of care for patients compromised.

We now need serious commitment to making Ireland a country in which nurses are not just welcome and appreciated but appropriately rewarded – a country in which young nurses can see potential for a meaningful, safe and satisfying career where the patient receives all the benefit.

I am honoured to host my first event as a newly-elected Seanadoír on Thursday 12May at Leinster House with my Sinn Féin colleagues in the Oireachtas. I have invited nurses from the four corners of Ireland to come together to celebrate International Nurses’ Day.

Thank you, nurses, everywhere, for all the hard work you do. It takes very strong, smart and compassionate people to take on the ills of the world with passion and purpose and work around the clock to maintain the health and well-being of others. It’s no wonder we are all exhausted at the end of the 13-hour shift!