International Nurses Day 2020
International Nurses Day is celebrated every May 12. The anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, British social reformer, statistician and founder of modern nursing. She was born in 1820. This year, on the 200th anniversary, the nursing profession gets some of the due attention and recognition since nurses are contemporary heroes in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic around the world.
APOPO is proud to join today’s celebration and express its gratitude to the profession and all brave caregivers. Today, we’d like to greatly acknowledge the nurses serving on our tuberculosis (TB) detection teams, Maria Chambino in Maputo, and Alemu Lakew in Addis Ababa. It is our nurses who help ensure a seamless cooperation with our partner clinics every day. It is them who make sure that our work goes beyond the testing of samples and that the service to patients always comes first. They are involved in making sure our TB-test results reach the caregivers, community health workers and patients as quickly as possible – so that they can receive the care they need to get well again.
Photo © Maarten Boersema. Alemu speaking to an elderly patient at clinic.
Just as Nightingale’s understanding of nursing intersected with many aspects of advancing care and medicine, public health, hygiene, epidemiology and statistics – our nurses enable us to build bridges as well. Bridges between our TB detection rat research and TB services in the field, and bridges between finding new patient and treating them, which are vital components to ending TB.
More info on the International Nurses Day campaign here.