Thursday, 11 May 2023 | Dr BKS Sanjay & Dr Gaurav Sanjay
GUEST COLUMN
The International Nurses Day is celebrated every year on May 12, the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale. It was first proposed by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953. The International Nurses Council celebrated this day for the first time in the year 1965. It was decided in 1974 to celebrate May 12 as International Nurses Day.
Nightingale was an English social reformer who is called the mother of modern nursing. She rendered outstanding services to the wounded soldiers, opened the way for nursing and opened the first nursing school in 1860. She exemplified how one person can make a change in the whole world. International Nurses Day is celebrated to recognise and to appreciate the hard work, dedication and contribution of nurses in health services, to honor them, to educate and train nurses for the welfare of patients and to discuss various issues related to nurses.
The theme of this year’s International Nurses Day is “Our Nurses, Our Future”. Nurses play an essential role in our medical institutions. They cater not only to the medical needs but also the physical rehabilitation and mental needs of the patients. They give medicines and injections as per the doctor’s instructions, but they also measure their vitals, help in their feed, urination and defecation and maintaining medical records. We think if there is one person who is more important than the doctor in the treatment of patients, it is the nurse. Today, nurses are not only helping in the investigation and treatment of patients but also advising patients and their relatives to avoid other diseases.
As a surgeon, we would also say that if the surgeon and anaesthetist are important in the success of an operation, the nurses who assist in the operation theatre and maintain the patient in the ward are equally important. Nowadays, the number of hazards in the operation has increased but the number of hazards after the operation has not decreased as much as it should have, especially in countries like ours.
Infection is the most dangerous risk after an operation, which is a deciding factor after a surgery. It is a huge responsibility of nurses to keep the patient clean for the sanitation workers, the patient and their relatives to know about the importance of cleanliness.
In our understanding, not many doctors are close to the patients but many nurses have closer bonds with the patient. It has been seen many times that the patient does not talk openly or tell all problems to the doctor or surgeon like he or she does to the nurse. A scientific study has proved that when the doctor visits or talks to the patient, the patient’s blood pressure increases more than before and on the contrary, when the nurse visits or talks to the patient, the blood pressure decreases relatively due to her/his arrival. If you assess it in simple terms, the patient’s intimacy with the doctor is not as much as it is with the nurse. In our opinion, the nurses are not getting as much respect from the society and system as they deserve. In addition to the qualifications for nursing, they also require sensitivity towards the patient and society. We think it’s not just a job, it’s also a selfless service to society. Nurses do not discriminate against any kind of patients as was seen during the recent Covid pandemic and earlier with patients of AIDS, leprosy, cholera and plague.
Today, like doctors, there is a shortage of nurses in our country. If we look at the norms of the World Health Organisation (WHO), there is a shortage of about 40 lakh nurses in the country today. Today, there are 1.7 nurses per 1,000 population in the country, while according to the WHO there should be three nurses per 1,000 people. To some extent, nursing schools and colleges are opening in the country, due to which proportionately the number of nurses is increasing, but the quality of nurses is not improving correspondingly as desired. We have seen that nurses who are well behaved with professional and communication skills look for a better opportunity abroad. Trained nurses from India are serving all over the world today.
The quality of the work depends on the quality of the worker and the quality of the worker depends upon the worker’s behaviour, knowledge and skill. As mentioned earlier, nurses are as important as doctors in keeping our health services healthy. It would be better if the policy makers focus on increasing not only the quantity of nurses but enhancing their quality also with a good rigorous patient oriented curriculum.
(The authors are orthopaedic surgeons based in Dehradun. The views expressed are personal)
