Nurses, health care workers take spotlight during recognition week

Never have nursing professionals been more highly valued than since the COVID-19 pandemic brought their challenging and vital work to the public consciousness.

So National Nurses Week, sponsored by the American Nurses Association, is being celebrated by local hospitals and health care facilities with great enthusiasm.

During this week, nurses nationwide are recognized for their service and dedication to caring for and improving the health of patients. Throughout the week, health care organizations celebrate their teams and it is hoped that individuals will also thank the nurses who have made a difference in their lives.

Not coincidentally, National Hospital Week (May 7-13 this year) overlaps the celebration - both are timed around the May 12 birthday of Florence Nightingale (born in 1820), the founder of modern nursing who established a nursing school in England during the mid-1860s.

"National Nurses Week is a special time at all Northwestern Medicine hospitals," said Gina Reid Tinio, chief nursing executive at the 159-bed Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva. "This year won't really be an escalation from our pre-COVID years within Delnor, but we are trying to be even more collaborative with our communities as we focus on wellness. For instance, we have community volunteers coming in to provide yoga, reflexology, hand massages and pet therapy and we have a local artist and a Girl Scout Troop planning to chalk our walks with art and inspirational messages that our nurses can see when they arrive for work."

At the 390-bed Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, another Northwestern Medicine facility, the week will similarly be filled with award and scholarship ceremonies, professional development activities and lectures, food trucks providing meals and even a concert by Vital Signs, a popular rock band comprising hospital physicians, according to Suzanne McCoy, chief nursing executive.

NorthShore - Edward-Elmhurst Health's three south region hospitals - Elmhurst Hospital, Edward Hospital and Linden Oaks Behavioral Hospital - also are "all in" when it comes to celebrating their nurses. They hold a nurses breakfast every month and also bestow a Daisy Award for excellence in nursing to one nurse each month.

But during Nurses Week each May, they offer food treats during each round-the-clock shift; distribute gifts to every nurse; host an awards banquet; sponsor a gift basket raffle; and offer special professional development programs, animal-assisted therapy and various continuing education fairs. Cards from local schoolchildren, thanking nurses, are distributed as nurses report for work one weekend morning. Patients and their family members are also encouraged to make and send cards to nurses who cared for them, according to Marcie Lafido, vice president, chief nursing officer at the 259-bed Elmhurst Hospital.

"We even do a 'blessing of the hands' ceremony at each hospital and leave coloring pages and pencils in the break rooms for the nurses to enjoy on their breaks," she added.

Advocate Health Care is similarly appreciative of the scores of nurses who make their hospitals - including the 255-bed Sherman Hospital in Elgin - function effectively daily.

"We feel great appreciation of our entire nursing staff," said Susan Morby, vice president and chief nursing officer at Advocate Sherman Hospital. "We recently earned our third Magnet Hospital re-designation, something only 2% of hospitals nationwide earn. Even when the pandemic was raging, members of our staff met monthly to prepare our application and that helped to keep us grounded and weather the COVID-19 storm."

During Nurses Week, Advocate Sherman Hospital will celebrate the accreditation with a hospitalwide pinning ceremony; participate in an Advocate-wide virtual professional development summit on wellness; bestow their annual Nursing Excellence Awards; provide many food treats; have pet therapy providers concentrating their healing work on nurses; and put on a hospitalwide employee-created art show.

The pandemic took a toll on nursing, causing many experienced nurses to retire early and curtailing some of the wide-ranging experience nursing students would have normally received.

"It is estimated that by 2027, the nation will be 800,000 nurses short of what are needed," said Delnor Hospital's Reid Tinio. "We had to get creative and offer new nurses the option to go directly into critical care, interventional radiology or surgery instead of starting in a more traditional medical-surgical nursing role and rotating. Five years ago, we never would have put a new graduate into an operating room."

"We had the same nursing shortage as everyone during the pandemic, so we created an internal agency program to ensure safe staffing while we focused on recruiting experienced nurses and developing newly graduated nurses," Elmhurst Hospital's Lafido said.

"But then the bleed of experienced nurses eventually stopped and we stabilized. Some areas of the hospital did not lose as many nurses as others, but the emergency department and critical care felt the biggest impact. Fortunately, nurses from other departments chose to transition to fill positions and then we were also able to take recent nursing graduates to fill positions," she continued.

"Most nursing students get very minimal exposure to surgical nursing and other specialties, so those positions - like the emergency department, oncology, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and the intensive care unit - are tough to fill. But we are now taking interested new graduates into those specialties and having our experienced nurses mentor them," Central DuPage Hospital's McCoy added.

All seem to agree, however, that night shifts are hardest to fill, as are some specialty departments, so they are having to rethink how they recruit for those positions and even how they deliver care.

For instance, Central DuPage is counting on their "tried and true night shift professionals" to help train new recruits and Delnor has hired a night shift educator to connect with new nursing graduates and help them perform new tasks; established an inter-professional night shift council to share in decision making; and produced a night shift recruitment video.

But things seems to be turning a corner as the pandemic national emergency officially ends May 11.

"We just began taking applications for this June's class of new nurses and already have over 75 applications, so our staffing is stabilizing," said Elmhurst Hospital's Lafido.

"COVID certainly took a toll, but I recently met with a group of our nurses, and they are still passionately invested in their jobs. Nursing is a calling. We just must always encourage them to remember that passion," she said.