A message from Interim Dean Flynn on Nurses Day
Hi Faculty,
I was looking for a pretty little image to paste into a message, wishing you a Happy Nurses Day.
But, many of the pretty pics just don’t do justice to the tremendous contributions that nurses bring to patient care.
So, as we celebrate her birthday, I selected, instead, a graph of the plain and simple evidence that Florence Nightingale gathered in the study that only she could have conducted; a comparison of the wounded soldier mortality rate before nurses arrived at the field hospital in the Crimean to the wounded soldier mortality rate about a year after Nightingale nurses began staffing that same field hospital.
Prior to the arrival of “trained Nightingale nurses” there were approximately 415 deaths per 1,000 wounded soldiers in that Crimean field hospital ; after a year of Nightingale nurses and the change in care practices that they implemented, the mortality rate at that same hospital was reduced to 11.5 per 1,000. Although Nightingale demonstrated this in the now famous pie chart, I prefer the 21st century depiction of those same data – the bar chart below.
Nurses today are still saving lives, and you are the folks who teach them how. On days that you feel discouraged, on days that you’re tired, on days that your frustrated…remember this amazing graph…the plain and simple truth…you and all those you teach….save lives.
HAPPY NURSES DAY!
Linda Flynn, PhD, RN, FAAN