Observing International Nurses Week 2021

Nursing, an often misunderstood profession, is usually viewed through prisms that portray it in its medieval forms: the tray holders, the trolley pushers and the physicians’ assistants. That is probably what majority understand the nursing profession to be. But it is much more than that.

Nursing is care giving in a holistic form to the infirmed, the dying and even the most healthy. Nursing is care for every category of the social strata: the individual, the family and the community. Nursing is helping you recover to a state of optimal health when you are ill; making sure you attain the highest possible degree of good health and ensuring that you maintain it.

You can clearly deduce what a holistically encompassing profession nursing is by reading through the description of the functions of the nurse given by Virginia Avenel Henderson who said: “The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge.”

Drilled in theory and rigorous clinical trainings, the central philosophy of nursing is its emphasis on person-centered care, taking not only the biomedical, but the psychological, social and environmental aspects of it. Every person’s algorithm of care is different from that of the other; nursing is purely personcentered.

Nursing is multi-tasking, at a time nurses can serve as educators, counsellors, confidants and at another they can serve as care givers, mediators and advocates for their patients.

Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system: the custodians of hospital wards, the most stressed yet still the most empathetic and compassionate. The nurse is that person that invests all of her time into understanding you and the challenges you are facing in her quests towards formulating the right plan of care, specifically for you.

The nurse is that person you puke on and he/she smiles; that person that cleans and dresses your wounds no matter how obnoxious and still smiles. He/she is the one that does your manual disimpaction(evacuation of faeces by inserting a gloved finger into the anal canal and breaking up the impacted feces with a scooplike motion) and does your vulva toileting and still respects you and upholds your dignity.

And after all the care and that fondness the nurse develops for his/her patient, he/she gets the most psychological hit when a patient dies (nurses cannot count how many of such incidences they have had to cope with!), imagine how devastating this could be!

Yet with all these, he/she is looked upon as an inferior being. They spend the most hours working yet their remuneration is relatively discouraging; they remarkably manage the wards and make it conducive for both patients and other health workers, yet they are looked upon as people that do not have the ability and capacity to manage the entire hospital. They are the closest to the sick yet they still are deprived of their right to be part of healthcare policy making. They are the backbone of the healthcare system yet appropriate investment in their education is an option the government is never willing to properly consider.

Today, nurses stand firmly, guarding the wall built between you and the ravaging pandemic, and despite all challenges they are facing, they still stand; bravely.

Let us appreciate them and celebrate with them the “2021 International Nurses Week”.

I am proud to be a nurse.

Abdulhaleem Ishaq Ringim is a registered nurse and sent this piece from from Zaria.