International Nurses Day 12 May 2016: A miscellany
This year’s theme for International Nurses Day is: Nurses: A Force for Change: Improving health systems' resilience.
Starting with you, here are a few things that may help your personal professional resilience - or at least, amuse you.
Remembering why you chose nursing...
What advice would you give to new nurses?
- Frances Hughes is amongst those offering advice to new graduates in a collection of perspectives from nursing leaders at Medscape nursing (login for free).
- And, for a real shot in the arm, read the comments, which though peppered with some sincere disaffection, are wonderfully positive and affirming for nurses of all ages and stages.
Since its Florence Nightingale’s birthday, try this quiz
- Also at Medscape, How Much Do You Know About Flo? Wonderfully interesting and informative answers.
Hear Nightingale speak
- The story of how there is a recording of Florence Nightingale speaking in support of the Light Brigade Relief Fund in 1890, is at the British Library Sounds Archive.
- Lady Keith had alerted me to this recording and in 1997 we used it in International Nurses Day event “Don’t Miss Nightingale” at Parliament, hosted by The Honourable Bill English, then Minister of Health. An abridged and edited version of the script for the presentation, Nightingale Recalled, which includes cues for the actor taking the role of Florence Nightingale (and speaking from her writings) is available here.
Read anything by Nightingale lately?
- What about the sixteen volume Collected Works of Florence Nightingale...?
- Or her letters? The Florence Nightingale Digitization Project has a database of about 2000 handwritten letters – out of an estimated 19,000. The project is a collaboration begun by the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, England, the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Royal College of Nursing and the Wellcome Library, with other organisations also contributing their collections. The project has the aim of making the work of Florence Nightingale available.
- Or for a real diversion, you could read, a little book about Nightingale’s pet owl Athena, by her sister Parthenope, Lady Vernon - Life and death of Athena: an owlet from the Parthenon.
Have a wonderful day as a nurse, today, and every day.