On National Nurses Day: A Charge for the Future

Today, on National Nurses Day, the praise is pouring in for nurses across the U.S.—as well it should. From practicing physicians to nurse executives, to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Veterans Administration (VA) Health Care, laudatory messages have been flying across social media. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tweeted, “For all the long nights and hard days, CDC thanks you for protecting your patients and saving lives with #vaccination.”

The U.S. Department of Defense tweeted, “Nurses are protectors, leaders, and superheroes. We honor them on this National #Nurses Day and join @MilitaryHealth in celebrating #NursesWeek.”

And CMS Administrator Seema Verma wrote, “Thank you to the millions of nurses across our country for their continuous dedication to the care of America’s patients!”

Meanwhile, Leigh Spann, a meteorologist at WFLA in Tampa, created a meme (see illustration) that said, “A nurse is basically a superhero in scrubs”—very true.

And I particularly enjoyed this very candid, blunt tweet from Peter Grinspoon, M.D., a physician who describes himself as “the author of the memoir Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction,” and who “currently practices as a primary care physician at an inner-city clinic in Boston and is on staff at Massachusetts General Hospital,” and who teaches medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Greenspan tweeted this: “Huge THANK YOU to all the #nurses I work with who are awesome, who put up with same crap as doctors do with—if possible—even less support and respect, and who do so with compassion, humor and vast competence! Nurses are the foundation of healthcare.”