BRATTLEBORO — This year's official annual observance of National Nurse's Week took place from May 6–12. It's a special time when those of us who have made a career in health care step back to appreciate our nurse colleagues for their extraordinary compassion, skill, and dedication.
The American Nurses Association has chosen “Nurses Leading the Way” as this year's theme, and my fellow nurses stand out as leaders in countless ways: embracing new technologies, adapting to ever-changing demands, and developing innovative ways to help our patients recover, stay safe, and look forward to new possibilities they might never have imagined.
More than 3 million nurses in the U.S. work in countless health-care settings where she or he has a unique opportunity to make lasting impacts on the lives of patients and their families.
And those of us who are nurses can definitely remember certain patients and families we took care of where a real and profound connection took place - a connection so powerful it could almost take your breath away.
To me, this is the heart of nursing.
It's the ability to look beyond people as patients and see the human being inside, fanning their strengths, giving hope when it looks like none can be found, and helping to lighten the load that comes with bearing illness and pain.
Nurses are the rock that others can lean on when their world has fallen apart.
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Here at the Brattleboro Retreat, we celebrated the week by acknowledging all of our nurses and mental-health workers with a host of activities, some of them social, some of them educational.
I also publicly applaud the nurses who work so hard in other health care institutions in our community, including Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, Grace Cottage, Cheshire Medical Center, and HCRS.
Should the opportunity arise, take a moment to let a nurse know how much you appreciate what he or she does, any week of the year.
Somewhere along the line I am confident you will hear about, or encounter, a nurse who has done something extraordinary, and merely thinks of it as just another part of her or his day.