Can You Celebrate a Nurse This Week?

May 6 is National Nurse Appreciation Day.

May 6 – 12, 2025 is National Nurses’ Week. Most of us have interacted with nurses in their varying roles - in the clinic, in the hospital, in the school - and have witnessed their positive impact on our lives. Nurses are trusted advocates who ensure that individuals, families, and communities receive quality, compassionate patient care.

My personal experience

As a neonatologist, I practiced for over thirty years in various NICUs, and I could not have done my job in the NICU without the help of a nurse - every step of the way, every day, and in every way.

A NICU nurse alerted me to patients’ problems, she called me to come and look at a new finding, she handed me instruments, she assisted me with a procedure, she let me know when a parent had questions, she ran to the labor and delivery suite with me to resuscitate a newborn infant. She bundled up the new baby to show mom and dad.

She administered medications oh-so-carefully - small doses for tiny patients. He tediously checked central lines and tubes for proper function. She assisted radiology and ultrasound technicians to get the best image of her patinet. He moved babies into transport incubators and carted babies off to be studied in another area of the hospital. Sometimes, she traveled on a transport call in an ambulance or helicopter to pick up a sick baby and bring them back to our NICU.

She helped a new mother with her breast pump and treated her breastmilk like liquid gold, always encouraging the mother to keep pumping, and emphasizing the benefit only mom could provide in this way.  She struggled to make sure that skin-to-skin holding was safe for mom and baby. (Just imagine moving a small baby hooked up to several tubes and wires onto mom’s chest without pulling anything out!)

She was there for mom’s first feeding at the breast. She let me know when she was worried that a new mom might be showing signs of depression. She patiently taught some moms how to bottle feed their baby when there was an uncoordinated suck and swallow.

A nurse kept the terrified parents calm and explained again all the things I had just told them. Sometimes parents are afraid to ask the doctor, and, for some reason, they will always ask their baby’s nurse. She was always at the bedside, a constant presence of knowledge, skill, and calm reassurance. 

These are just a few of the invaluable tasks done by NICU nurses - men and women - every hour of every day on my patients’ behalf.  Nurses are an integral part of the NICU team of care. They are integral to all care teams.

My older daughter has worked diligently as a Pediatric ICU Nurse for nine years. I was so pleased that she also loved both ICU medicine and pediatrics. She wanted more autonomy, however, and now she has become a PICU Nurse Practitioner (NP). She completed her masters degree, was certified as a Pediatric NP - Acute Care, and as a result, she can perform almost any task and prescribe any medicine that a physician can in the PICU. I am so proud of her hard work and her many accomplishments!

Some Facts about Nurses

In the Gallup annual professions poll, the American public rates nurses the highest among a host of professionals, including medical doctors, engineers, dentists, and veterinarians. Nurses rank even higher than grade school teachers.

There are approximately 4.3 million actively licensed, working RNs. This is a net increase of 400,000 licensed RNs since 2017. The nursing workforce is becoming more racially, and ethnically diverse, and male RNs now make up 12% of the workforce. The average age of an RN is 48 years. RNs are getting younger with only one third of them older than 55 years. These numbers are from the recent Health Resources & Services Admin. HRSA.gov. survey.

While overall job satisfaction among RNs remains high, around 80%, job satisfaction declined the most among hospital-based RNs.  These nurses felt burned out at some point in their career, with most reporting burnout during the pandemic. Younger RNs under age 34 were hit the hardest.  

The bad news:

• The HRSA projects a shortage of 78,610 full-time RNs in 2025 and 63,720 full-time RNs in 2030.

• Approximately 195,000 RNs left the workforce due to the pandemic.

• Increased demand for healthcare services, an aging population, nursing school faculty shortages, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic are all contributing to the current shortage.

• The most common reasons for leaving the workforce are high-risk working conditions (51%), feelings of being overworked or burned out (50%), inadequate staffing (39%), and unsatisfactory safety protocols (37%).

Every two years the American Nurses Foundation and other national care groups survey thousands of nurses. In 2023, now almost two years after the pandemic, U.S. nurses reported stress at work (68%), exhaustion (58%), symptoms of burnout (43%) and feeling anxious at work (46%).

Recently, nurses report that they feel like their employer does not care about their well-being (45%) and many state that they are overworked (45%). Almost half of nurses continue to feel that their contributions to care are not appreciated by their employer.

Adequate compensation continues to be a main concern for nurses. In other surveys, three quarters of nurses (75%) want better pay, and inadequate staffing remains a huge concern, with 64% wanting to address the serious issues of job stress and less than adequate patient care as a result of inadequate staffing. Finally, most nurses want better schedules and flexibility in scheduling.

Can you imagine feeling this bad during a difficult day at work? Well, nurses do sometimes.

If you know a nurse, or a nurse-practitioner, please give her, or him, a big hug. They work hard to care for their patients - us and our families. Tell them you appreciate what they do! We all need a reminder to be kind to the nurses we encounter along the way in our everyday lives.

If you know a hospital or practice administrator, a nursing manager or hospital vice-president, please consider having a conversation with them about the situation with their nursing staff. Ask them what they are doing to support their nursing staff.

If you enjoy my writing and these facts, please hit the❤️ button below and restack by hitting the 🔄️ button. Then other people can find my work. Thanks for reading!