This International Year of the Nurse and Midwife has tested us like never before. Although the world has been waiting for a pandemic, and there have been scares (SARS, MERS, Ebola), here we are with COVID 19. Nurses worldwide have packed away their celebratory banners and put on masks and shields. Some of the nurses are working as never before, in dangerous and heart-breaking situations. Others are physically distanced from the vulnerable patients, doing our best to care for them without the benefit of proper assessments. Regardless of the situation, it is without a doubt that nurses have done what we always do, step right in and get the job done.
I couldn’t be prouder of my nursing colleagues and to be a nurse! We now walk with the banner of highest accreditation the magnet accreditation. Combating the pandemic we have expanded to double our capacity in Cleveland clinic Abu Dhabi hospital. But there is so much more to nursing than striving for perfection. As I’ve continued down this path, now having been in nursing for 10 years, there is nothing like our fellow nurses who know what it’s like to chase a call light, or clean that one horrible mess, or stand and take a yelling-at from that one patient family member. We inspire and encourage each other. The flexibility and dedication of nurses in this hospital has proved a deployment is no big deal for us nurses! Every day we see the world in its most raw, inexplicable, unfair form of reality and somehow, by the grace of our inherit hope for humanity, and immeasurable depth of courage, still love it…
WHO in its (State of the World’s Nursing Report – 2020, 2020) have claimed that nurses are critical to deliver on the promise of “leaving no one behind” and the global effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As much as nursing is meeting the challenge of COVID 19 in the full glare of the public spotlight, we’ll also be tending to the repercussions of these difficult times, long after the cameras have turned away. For decades we have seen nurse-driven ideas and innovations that were the turning points in different world crises: Florence Nightingale introducing sanitary practices during the Crimean War; Jean Ward discovering that sunlight and phototherapy can cure jaundice; nurses offering compassionate care to HIV+ and AIDS patients at the start of that pandemic. YSN brought the hospice model to the U.S., an example of our clinical and scientific innovation (Peart, 2020).
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At the end when the history of this pandemic will be written, good nursing care will have been found to have been a key indicator of survival because of nurses’ work on the frontlines, where they are stretching their bodies and minds to the maximum. To be together, we will network, increase our knowledge, expand our vocabulary, and charge our personal batteries so we can continue to be an advocate for one of the best professions—nursing.
