Celebrate National Nurses Week

Get ready to kick off National Nurses Week! This annual event to recognize the compassionate and critical work nurses perform and to celebrate the profession begins tomorrow, May 6 and lasts until May 12.

The week provides time to honor the role of nurses in their own lives and in the collective national landscape.

This year’s theme: Nursing: The Balance of Mind, Body, and Spirit reflects the American Nurses Association’s designation of 2017 as the Year of the Healthy Nurse. The theme points to the delicate and essential equilibrium that nurses must find to successfully thrive in such a distinctly unique profession.

National Nurses Week is marked throughout the nation in all kinds of settings—from healthcare settings to nursing schools.

Vanderbilt University’s School of Nursing Dean Linda Norman says the week offers a chance to celebrate nurses and to also take a look at where the profession is going.

Vanderbilt, which has both a medical center and a nursing school, has events including a blessing of the hands and a state of nursing address by the chief nursing officer. There are awards to recognize outstanding nurses and a dean’s diversity lecture that will examine how the nursing profession as a whole can meet the needs of a diverse population.

At the nursing school, where more than 900 students take classes, there will be several versions of birthday parties for Florence Nightingale whose birthday is marked every May 12.

“We are having an ice cream social for the students just to say, ‘We’re glad you’ve chosen nursing and this is our way of celebrating nurses,’” says Norman.

Here are a few ideas to celebrate National Nurses Week either with colleagues, family, friends, or by yourself:

Have a party

Nurses deserve to have someone else take care of them, so having a reception at work or meeting for lunch with your nurse friends offers time to stop and celebrate.

Say Thanks

If you supervise other nurses, be sure to thank them for all they do. They are the front lines of patient care and perform superhuman feats each day.

Learn More

Spread the word about the ANA’s free webinar “A Nurse’s Guide to Preventing Compassion Fatigue, Moral Distress, and Burnout” on May 10 at 1 pm EDT (registration closes on May 9 at 7 pm EDT).

Between May 12 and May 17, you may also view the free webinar recording of “Empathy 101: How to Care for Yourself While Emotionally Supporting Others,” offered by Nurse.com at http://ce.nurse.com/course/Web332 . The webinar features Kati Kleber, BSN, RN, CCRN.

As Norman says, the week also offers a time for nurses to consider the journey that brought them to where they are. Norman says she is frequently reminded of her own journey.

“It is a time for us to reflect on the choice we made back when we were deciding on our profession,” she says. “To be able to try to meet the needs of others—that’s a privilege. To teach others how to do that—that’s an even bigger privilege.”