Everyyear on May 12 International Nurses Day celebrates Florence Nightingale’s birth. Kate Woodhead RGN DMS examines how the global celebration, led by the InternationalCouncil of Nurses (ICN), promotes nursing and their rolein healthcare throughout the world.
On 12 May, International Nurses Day provides a broad range of resources and evidence,1 with events helping to raise the profile of nursing. This year the emphasis has been on the provision of ‘Health for All’ which they say needs a complete transformation in the approach to health and wellbeing: “Health for All means that health is brought into reach of everyone in a given country.” Health, in this context, means not just the availability of health services, but a complete state of physical and mental health that enables a person to lead a socially and economically productive life.2
As one of the most trusted and respected health professions, nursing has a pivotal role to addressing the multiple health challenges that are being faced all over the world. Nurses are the engine room of the health system and are required to respond to the health needs of individuals, communities and the world. With a core role as a patient advocate, their scientific reasoning skills, numbers and spectrum of care across the continuum, nurses are ideally placed to lead and inform health services decision making and policy development.3
Disparities in health provision
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