The medical profession has been built by hardship.
People go in for all kinds of mundane things now. Refill this prescription for headaches. Get a few stitches on a cut from a fall. A referral for physical therapy or a pregnancy test.
But what built the legion of medical professionals have been epidemics and wars. Sometimes both. World War I ended just as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was beginning.
Nursing, specifically, has been a response to overwhelming numbers of people in need. In the 19th century, Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale turned what had been a somewhat amateur way to provide comfort to the injured or dying into a calling. Ultimately, that job was as critical to winning a war as weapons or strategic assaults. The more soldiers who survived, the fewer replacements were needed and the stronger an army became.
Epidemics did the same. People survive all manner of diseases today, not just because of the pharmaceutical industry but because of the nurses who have built on the knowledge their forbears gathered treating influenza, typhus, measles, malaria, tuberculosis and more of the maladies that are no longer day-to-day occurrences in the United States.
And that is why this is National Nurses Week — an annual event that falls over Nightingale’s birthday.
This year, it is particularly poignant.
In 2020, there was barely time to take a deep breath and a masked break to show appreciation for the estimated
4 million nurses nationwide. Hospitals were jammed with patients as nurses were part of the vital front lines fighting covid-19.
A year later, we have more time and fewer fears. The vaccine has made more opportunities available to save lives and more freedom to celebrate the brave men and women who do the job.
But there are also fewer nurses. More than 570,000 health workers contracted the virus in 2020. About 3,000 died.
On Monday, the Rev. Earl Gardner, a critical care nurse educator at Excela Health, and the Rev. Jeffrey Wylie of Christ’s Church in Greensburg blessed the hands of Excela Health Latrobe Hospital nurses and other staff.
It was more than just a tray of cookies in the break room. It wasn’t just a “we appreciate you” email. Although those gestures are lovely and heartfelt, there was something meaningful about the anointing of nurses’ hands. While nurses study medicine and review information, it is their hands that often mean the most to their patients.
While others kept a social distance away, nurses laid their healing hands upon sick bodies. They take temperatures and pulses, administer medicine and clean the skin. Nurses — from nurse practitioners to registered nurses to licensed practical nurses to nursing assistants — are the people who spend the most time with patients. They are the ones who come when called in a hospital.
And for months, as loved ones were kept at a distance by the pandemic, if anyone was there to hold a hand when people died in a hospital — from covid-19 or another cause — it was probably a nurse there for those final minutes.
There are fewer nurses than we need. Nationally, there are just 12 per 1,000 people. Pennsylvania fares a bit better with 15 per 1,000. But the population is aging. The largest group of nurses is older than 50, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
We need more nurses. We need them today and we need them for tomorrow. But failing that, the least we can do, especially this week, is appreciate the ones we have.
— Tribune-Review, Greensburg/TNS
