By Ruth Hill R.N.
A fitting theme for Nurses Week in 2025 is “The Power of Nurses” to honor the challenges of our country’s drastic shortage of nurses. Scores were fired for not accepting the COVID vaccine. Nurses nationwide and medical staff in hospitals, clinics, and other institutions have not recovered. American Nurses Enterprise is proud to partner with organizations vested in The Power of Nurses ™ and the future of healthcare. Last year, we illuminated 85 buildings in honor of nurses during National Nurses Week. We’re lighting up over 150 buildings this year, and you can help! City of Hope National Medical Center Duarte Campus Water Tower will be lit up May 6 – 12.
This article will mention a few nursing leaders who continue to advocate for safe, equal access to health care.
The Novel Practice of Handwashing
Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian doctor, during an experiment in a Vienna hospital’s maternity ward, discovered the wonders of the now-basic hygienic practice of hand washing to stop the spread of infection in 1847. Semmelweis was ridiculed, put in jail, and died for his heretical views. It took a pioneer, Florence Nightingale, to institute his groundbreaking practice. Nightingale considered the home to be a crucial site for disease-preventing interventions.
Nightingale transformed nursing into the disciplined, compassionate profession that it is today. She suffered severe disapproval from her father and family, who viewed her need to help the sick as degrading and beneath her station in life. It can be arduous to appreciate the difficulty of a woman who chooses to be cut off from her family. Women of stature were to be a wife and a mother. Undeterred, she persisted and won renown recognition for her discipline and cleanliness in caring for the British soldiers during the Crimean War. She started the first school for training nurses.
The American Red Cross
Clara Barton, “The Angel of the Battlefield,” witnessed the sad state of battle-weary soldiers in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. She lobbied in 1862 for permission to take bandages and other supplies to a battlefield hospital after the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Northern Virginia. From then on, she traveled with the Union Army. Barton also founded the American Red Cross.
Nurse Innovators
While on assignment in the Peace Corps as a nurse, Roxana Reyna devised a way to deliver sterile fluids intravenously to sick patients in Africa. Reyna combined different wound dressings to promote healing and kept the tissue clean and stable until surgery could be performed. Reyna’s discovery was used on children born with their intestines outside the abdomen.
It took a nurse, Mary Brown Rathbun, a cannabis advocate, to push the California legislators into passing the first state law that legalized medical marijuana. Rathbun foresaw the coming chaos of states adding a new diagnosis to the law every year. Her efforts led to the inclusion of two sentences in the law that ensured physicians, not legislators, decided the medical need for marijuana/cannabis as the cannabis science changed in the future.
It took Alice O’Leary Randall to form the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, a lobbying group, in 1976, to secure medical access from the federal government for her husband to use marijuana to treat his glaucoma. Nurse innovators like Mary Lynn Mathre and Al Byrne transformed the Alliance into a non-profit educational organization called “Patients Out of Time.”
The National Commission of State Boards of Nursing’s extensive research into the endocannabinoid system led to the development of standards of practice for patients using cannabis. While the American Medical Association continues to ignore the science behind the endocannabinoid system, nurses are the pioneers educating on safe use.
The American Cannabis Nurses Association, an organization that prioritizes educating nurses to become patient coaches on safe use, was started in 2015. In the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, today’s nurses are innovating, implementing, and influencing health policy in America. In 2023, the American Nurses Association declared Cannabis Nursing a specialty. Hug your powerful nurse today.
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