All leaders should use this month as an opportunity to recognize and thank nursing staff for their heroism.
Below are a few ideas I’ve collected for how to celebrate your nursing workforce:
- Thank their families. Nurses’ families have been making sacrifices throughout the epidemic so their loved ones can deliver care. Show your appreciation by mailing a thank-you note and a token of gratitude—for example, a pizza-making kit.
- Create spaces for nurses to share their stories. Give nurses an opportunity to recognize their peers by creating a live forum to share their stories on the front line. If asking staff to join a meeting is too time intensive, you can collect video clips or photos in advance and compile them in a video to be shared on your organisation’s website and intranet.
- Ask the community to share their thanks. Nursing has rarely been as publicly recognized as it is today. Give the community the opportunity to share their thanks with your staff. You can ask your marketing department to create a forum where the public can share videos of themselves thanking your organisation’s nurses—which can be compiled and shared throughout the month. Another option is to encourage community leaders to start a cloth face mask drive for hospital staff.
We support the important work nurses and midwives do every day, and the impact they have on the people they serve. We have seen people donate PPE and food, bring thank you cards, and clap at change of shifts to support our nurses and to show gratitude during hard times. And we here at Nurse Jobs Ireland have always celebrated nurses, not only on Nurses month, but we celebrate them all year long.
Celebrate Nurses Website is about positively recognising nurses and our goal is to ‘Capture Ireland’s Thank You’s’ to our Frontline Nursing Heroes on International Nurses Day May 12th. Write a thank you note, tweet, poem or essay, draw or paint a picture, upload photos – whatever way you want to express your positive recognition of nurses – just add the hashtag #CelebrateNurses to your creative endeavours.
We believe nursing will be resilient because caring about people is at the core of who we are and what we do, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. So this International Nurses Day, let’s celebrate nurses, but also let’s reflect on how we can contribute to the ongoing progress of the nursing profession.
Thank you, nurses. Happy National Nurses Day and Nurses Month!