Imagine, for a moment, walking into any hospital or urgent care or primary care clinic and there are no nurses around.
In our imagination, it’s either pure chaos as waiting rooms fill to bursting with patients who haven’t even made it to an exam room for initial questions and diagnostics or it’s eerily silent because the clinic is virtually defunct without any nursing staff on hand to provide and expedite medical services.
Nurses are the lifeblood of health care, working tirelessly and endlessly to keep medical services going — the ubiquitous front line we may take for granted. Usually, they are the first to tend to us when we report for our annual checkup or limp into the urgent care with some ailment or injury. And they often come back to check on us and make sure we have everything we need after the doctor has left — if a doctor is available to see us at all. In more and more places, particularly in general care practices and urgent cares, nurse practitioners are the only ones available. In long-term care centers, nurses are the ones who take care of us and our loved ones on a daily basis, ensuring that both our most basic and our more complex needs are met.
Which is why, during National Nurses Week, we’d like to thank the nurses in our community for everything they do: We see your hard work, and you have our sincerest appreciation.
