POLICY
The World Health Organization gave Elizabeth Iro the job of advocating for
nurses everywhere. //
Art by guillaume megevand
Before the pandemic hit, the World Health Organization had chosen 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Instead of attending symposia and celebrations, however, most nurses faced the most brutal months of their careers. In large countries and small, nurses offered hands-on care in the face of a new virus, attending to the health of their patients even when it meant risking their own safety and that of their families.
Elizabeth Iro, who was named the first chief nursing officer of the WHO in 2017, is making sure that the importance of nurses is amplified, not overshadowed, by the encounter with COVID-19. Iro served for more than 25 years as a nurse and midwife in the Cook Islands before becoming that country’s secretary of health. At the WHO, she immediately began working with a team on producin
The prime minister, chief nursing officers and an actor related to Florence Nightingale were among those who attended a service at Westminster Abbey last
Each year, International Nurses’ Day is a fantastic celebration of the profession and everything that it does.
The event in 2020 was, of course, overshadowed by the escalating coronavirus pandemic, with all physical celebrations cancelled and most too busy to think about it or feel like taking part. There is rightly an opportunity to use the event to reflect on and celebrate the incredible efforts of nursing staff working in every specialty and setting across the UK and beyond
It had been scheduled to be a big event too, with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale and the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife taking place.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Nurses from Cardiac Rehabilitation and the Ambulatory Division came together to create an outreach to NorthBay Healthcare’s most at-risk patients for Covid-19 – all 4,600 of them – early during the pandemic in spring 2020. (Courtesy photo)
Solano Voices: Nurses show mettle during pandemic
By Traci Duncan
Nursing has always been one of those professions that is difficult to understand unless you are a nurse. But given the visibility the pandemic brought to the nursing profession this past year, perhaps we are a step closer to being understood.
To say, “What a year!” is an understatement. No words can really capture the essence of 2020.