12th May is International
Nurses Day, celebrated by the International Council of Nurses (ICN)
since 1965. The significance of the date, as we all know, is that it is
the birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern
nursing. She established the first secular nursing school in 1860, the
Nightingale Training School , at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, and, in
doing so, laid the foundation of professional nursing. Nursing programs
the world over can trace their provenance to this act.
Florence Nightingale, however, was more
than just a pioneer in the field of nursing, and we would be doing her a
grave injustice by commemorating her birth anniversary solely for her
nursing achievements, howsoever illustrious and decorated they may be.
She was also a statistician, a social reformer, and a prodigious writer.
Florence Nightingale was a polymath, and her achievements outside
nursing too should serve as an inspiration to both nurses and to the
general public.
Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in
the graphical representation of statistics, and she was elected the
first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. She is credited
with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area
diagram,and sometimes referred to as the Nightingale rose diagram, to
illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field
hospital she managed during the Crimean War. The illustration below
depicts her graphical representation of the statistics. Her objective
was to bring down mortality rates, and to do so she observed and
collected data, collated it, analyzed it for insights, and rendered the
data in forms easily understood by a layperson.
Figure
1: Florence Nightingale’s Representation of Mortality Statistics in One
Theatre of the Crimean War (Source: Wikipedia –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nightingale-mortality.jpg)
When she was at the front, during the
Crimean War she believed the high death rates were due to poor nutrition
and lack of medical supplies, rather than due to poor sanitary
conditions at field hospitals. However, when she returned to England and
began collecting evidence for the Royal Commission on the Health of the
Army, she came to realise that most of the fatalities were actually on
account of poor living conditions. She was broadminded enough to change
her stance, and subsequently became a passionate advocate of sanitary
living conditions; as well as made significant contributions to the
subject of the sanitary design of hospitals.
Possibly on account of her systematic
and syncretic approach to analyzing a problem, her thinking, in some
areas of medicine, was far ahead of her time. She was an active
proponent of preventative medicine, as opposed to therapeutic medicine,
and realized that healthcare needed to be approached from a holistic
rather than a symptomatic perspective: both of which reflect 21st century healthcare trends.
Finally, in an age when women of means
were expected to marry and bear children only, and were groomed
accordingly, she had the courage of her passion and her convictions to
blaze her own path.
These accomplishments of Florence
Nightingale are as important as the work she carried out in the field of
nursing, and should inspire global nurses today to approach their
profession with the objective of improving healthcare practices and
outcomes the world over.
In India, the National Florence
Nightingale Award 2014 has gone to Dr. Punitha Vijaya Ezhilarasu,
Professor and Head of the Department of Surgical Nursing, College of
Nursing, Christian Medical College (CMC CON), Vellore. She will receive
the award from the President of India on the 12th of May.
Why don’t you drop in a line telling us who has been selected for this honour in your country?
