Nursing – The Backbone of Healthcare System
What comes to mind when one hears the word nurse is compassion, care, discipline, and knowledge.
For centuries, patients have relied on nurses for their well-being. Medical professionals too depend largely on nurses to tend to the patients once they prescribe the treatment. On nurses lie the onus of monitoring timely medication, food and rest for the patients. This age-old profession has undergone plenty of changes.
Nursing - one of the highly specialised professions in the health care sector has been constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of the society.
Besides dedication and thorough knowledge of the medical condition, nurses also use their critical thinking and judgement based on their experience and the patient’s medical history, to serve individual patients and help them regain their health. The challenges are aplenty.
Nursing began as part of service to the society in the early 19th century, but professional nursing began with Florence Nightingale who tended to the wounded soldiers in Britain’s Crimean War with 38 other women. She defied the societal norms that did not consider nursing as a respectable profession during that period. They cared for patients of infectious diseases owing to which the morbidity and mortality rate in many cases came down significantly.
Nurses transformed hospitals with their compassion, care, skill, knowledge and set a discipline in the hospitals. Today, their services are needed not only for patients in the hospitals but also for private care in homes for the terminally ill or the elderly. Full-time nurses are appointed by those who can afford it.
The educational structure of nursing also changed over the years. From nursing schools to colleges, formal education in nursing has undergone many changes to train these health care service providers with changing technologies and advancements in the field. Many countries university degrees in nursing and master’s programmes for specialisation and advanced nursing are imparted. As a career in nursing one can choose hospital-based nursing, community health-based nursing practice or mental health-nursing practice, care of women, care of children, geriatric nursing, advanced nursing, clinical nursing and many more. Geriatric nursing is in huge demand today with the increasing life expectancy and children flying off to far-away shores.
For the profession that was not looked upon as a very lucrative or respectable one, things have changed for good in the past few decades and nursing got its due. Many colleges are working hard to churn out the best of nurses by imparting quality education and training.
In an attempt to acknowledge this profession that is significant for a nation’s health, we at The Knowledge Review, have come up with a special edition - The 10 Most Leading Institutes in Nursing, 2021, dedicated exclusively to nurses and the institutes that are training future nurses for a healthy and vibrant society.
Have an insightful read!
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