Friday 12 May is International Nurses Day 2023. This special day is celebrated around the world each year to mark the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.
What I love most about being a nurse is the people. It’s like this beautiful dance where everyone – the nurses, medical team, allied health staff and admin – comes together to achieve amazing outcomes for our patients.
-Kirsty Nason
With an increasing focus in healthcare on multidisciplinary approaches to deliver patient-centred care, Kirsty Nason, Acting Nurse Unit Manager Neonatal Services at Mercy Hospital for Women, loves the collaborative aspects of her work.
Werribee Mercy Hospital
Today Mercy Health celebrates and recognises one of the community’s greatest strengths: our nurses. Nurses provide amazing care not only within our own services, but across countless and diverse settings both locally and globally.
The theme of International Nurses Day 2023 is ‘Our Nurses. Our Future’. This theme highlights the critical importance of nurses to public health, today and into the future.
Jason Payne, Chief Executive Health Services – Mercy Health, has a clinical background in nursing, so he is particularly well qualified to appreciate the tireless work of nurses.
Mercy Place Wyndham
“The global COVID-19 pandemic brought razor-sharp focus to the critical importance of nurses in caring for people across so many settings,” he said.
“Nurses make up such a significant proportion of the healthcare workforce as a whole. While all health professions play important roles, it’s the small armies of nurses and their highly-skilled, compassionate and, at times, unglamorous work that enables our health system as a whole to provide care to so many patients. And this was never more evident than during our recent global health crisis.”
At Mercy Health, we are pleased to have thousands of nurses working with us across the full spectrum of care from hospitals, operating theatres, outpatient clinics, palliative care and mental health services, through to exceptional care in more than 30 aged care homes and home care.
Mercy Hospital for Women
Naomi Fair, a nurse and a Clinical Care Manager at Mercy Place Mandurah, WA – one of Mercy’s residential aged care homes – highly values how versatile her chosen profession has been, as well as its opportunity to make a meaningful impact in the lives of others.
“Nursing offers a really wonderful and meaningful vocation, and it offers lots of career pathways that can give you so many options for the future, plus there’s always opportunities for continuous learning and further career development. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to make a positive difference to others during their working life.”
To all nurses, everywhere: thank you for the extraordinary work you do caring for others, today and every day.
Last reviewed May 12, 2023.
