Henry County Health Center celebrates National Nurses Week

Across the country this week, the nation?s three million nurses are being celebrated through National Nurses Week.

This week is always celebrated May 6 through May 12, based on Florence Nightingale?s birthday, which is May 12.

?Florence Nightingale?s considered the founder of modern nursing, with the work that she did almost a hundred years ago,? explained Jodi Geerts, chief nursing officer at Henry County Health Center. ?So, the legacy of Florence Nightingale lives on with the celebration of nurses week every year.?

Nursing councils at HCHC have been planning their own Nurses Week celebration for the past few months.

One of the projects they?ve created display boards put up on the cafeteria that showcase the different departments, the area of expertise, who the staff is and how long they have been there.

?That?s really neat to see out there. All of the nursing departments have done that,? said Geerts.

The councils also planned breakfasts, lunches and dinners for the week. They also have been planning the annual competencies, which Geerts describes as a ?reconfirmation of skills? and annual refreshers that need to be completed.

?There?s hands-on stuff and then didactic learning that they?ll do,? said Geerts. ?The nurses will all run through those this month.?

This week has also featured nursing forums to discuss the field and where it is headed in

?A lot of our focus is going to be on working with the Partnership for Patients Campaign, a national campaign, with a focus on 10 quality indicators,? said Geerts. ?Really the big push is to focus on keeping our patients well and not having them come back to the hospital.?

The goal of the campaign is to reduce the number of re-admissions that happen and to reduce the rates of hospital-acquired infections.

Looking at the field of nursing as a whole, although the field may make use of methods and devices unfamiliar in Nightingale?s time, Geerts noted that the fundamentals of the profession have stayed the same.

?Those have stayed constant. Nursing is a profession that looks at the patient as a whole,? said Geerts. ?It really examines the patient and their family as a whole, and that?s unique to the profession to look at the whole picture for the patient. That has not changed.?

One thing that has changed, said Geerts, is the education to be a nurse.

?There?s a few different avenues to take to become a nurse, but the licensing exam that all nurses have to take, whether you?re a two-year, three-year, four-year is the same. Everybody is licensed to the same standard,? said Geerts.

Nurses can pursue an LPN with one year of education; an associate degree RN with two years of education; a diploma-registered nurse with a three-year program or a bachelor?s degree in nursing with a four-year program.

While all are licensed to the same standard, Geerts said that the Institute of Medicine put out a report at the end of 2011 on the future of nursing, where the Institute recommended a push to have 80 percent of all nurses hold a bachelor?s degree.

Nurses currently make up the largest portion of the healthcare workforce, and as the baby boomer generation is reaching retirement age, Geerts said there will be a demand for nurses.

?It?s predicted that there?s going to be a big nursing shortage as so many of the baby boomers reach retirement age. That?s a large population of nurses that are expected to retire,? said Geerts.

Besides having opportunities across the country, future nurses also have a variety of options within the field.

?Nursing is just a field that there?s just so many opportunities, so many different places to work, and that?s really changed and expanded over time,? said Geerts.

Examples given by Geerts were that nurses can work in many different capacities within a hospital, they can work in education ? as a nurse educator teaching nursing or as a school nurse ? or they can work as a home nurse.

?My favorite thing about nursing is just how dynamic it is. No one day is ever the same. I get to work with patients, meet so many different people and be exposed to new things every day. It?s never the same,? said Geerts. ?You never know what you can expect, but I love the dynamics associated with that. It?s always different, and you always learn something every day.?