Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday and International Nurses Day
Today marks 200thyear of the birth of Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC, DSU was a British reformer and statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale, born on 12 May 1920 in Florence , Italy, ided on 13 August 1910, Mayfair , London, attained prominent by trailblazing modern nursing became popular while serving as a Manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers. Nightingale’s birth is commemorated as International Nurses Day.
As workers across the globe continue to battle against the coronavirus pandemic nursing has never been so pertinent.
Her data-based work helped shape modern nursing- founding the nursing school at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, developing palliative care and midwifery, and shaping the redesign of hospitals across the UK and the health system itself.
Her passion for data saw her become the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society, while her invention of Coxcombe, an early version of a pie chart, used to show Queen Victoria and her government the connection between cleanliness and the mortality rate of British soldiers is being used even today to combat the current pandemic.
Kristin Buhnemann, assistant director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in Westminster, said that: “ Before this, nurses were not changing their uniforms or aprons, instead continuing to work with the same equipment, which she believed to be incredibly un hygienic. We now see this essential equipment being used properly and thrown in the bin after every use, because she was the first to identify the impact of health workers’ hygiene o patients’ mortality rates. Nightingale was forced to pay for supplies such as aprons and water buckets out of her own pocket, showing clear parallels with the urgent need for PPE while today’s nurses battle the pandemic”.