Writing these blog posts gives me a chance to showcase some of the great work done by our team at NLM, and reflect on the roles I play as part of the NIH leadership team, Director of the National Library of Medicine, a mother-daughter-sister-aunt-friend, and an advocate for self-care management education and support for all people. Yet, nothing compares to the opportunity that this blog gives me to reflect on my chosen profession, nursing.
This year for National Nurses Day, I want to acknowledge the enormous contributions made by all health care professionals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly by the nurses and members of nursing care teams. I want to express my sorrow and deepest sympathies to the friends, families, and co-workers of nurses who faced health issues or died from work-acquired COVID-19 infections. I am grateful to front line care providers, ranging from nursing home aides to emergency department staff, particularly the nurses whose creative problem solving and attention to complex patient needs helped so many over the past year.
Nurses are well known for their ability to innovate—finding just the right way to make one patient more comfortable or address the respiratory distress of another. The perplexities brought about by the unfamiliarity of the coronavirus infection required innovation at warp speed in nursing units across the country.
I thank you, my nurse colleagues, for what you did over this past year and what you continue to do in the face of tremendous personal risk and self-sacrifice. May your accomplishments give you the strength you need to continue, and your contributions be acknowledged and treasured by those for whom you care.
For my part, I’m not on the front line physically, but the role NLM played this past year was focused on finding ways to support people who are on the front lines of this pandemic. Whether it was providing patient-specific COVID-19 information through our MedlinePlus Connect service, or expanding access to and making available coronavirus-related journal articles to support evidence based practice approaches, NLM has been here for YOU!
We collaborated with publishers to drop paywalls, so that the literature could be available to anyone who needed it. We accelerated processing of genomic sequences to speed up the process of tracking variants and identifying new drug targets. Our team at NLM helped mount the NIH’s response to the COVID pandemic with new research programs, particularly designing advanced data systems to make sure we learn as much from this experience to prepare for the next. While literature cannot provide the comfort of a hug, it can provide ideas that can aid in supporting someone through the process of grief.
My thoughts turn to my nurse colleagues who have witnessed so much death this year—among your patients, co-workers, and communities at large. I extend my wishes for resilience and comfort. I can offer little, but the acknowledgement that your experience of COVID-19 was so different from mine, and the assurance that NLM’s programs of research and offerings of significant literature resources will continue to make available the information needed for practice, and the learning that comes from practice.
In April 2020, as the pandemic was emerging, our colleagues from the United Kingdom offered some helpful hints in this Journal of Clinical Nursing article, one of the freely accessible articles made available through NLM’s Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative. The authors encouraged nurses to address their own psychological and safety needs through peer and team support. This includes looking after each other’s well-being and encouraging temporary and long-standing teams to check-in on each other—particularly at the beginning of a shift, where such contact can activate a sense of social support. The authors also exhort that the stress response to staffing shortages, a sense of futility, and unrelenting grief is normal and will resolve – and yet each person responds differently, so make sure you check in with yourself!
For every one of you who greets each workday with the worry of exposing your family to COVID-19 or putting yourself in harm’s way, I thank you for persisting, and for what you are doing for patients. I trust that the next few months will be a time for resetting your practice to something that is manageable and less fraught with risks.
As we celebrate Nurses Day, we do so with sadness arising from the strains experienced by our profession over the past year, the loss from too many deaths, and the exuberance of the enduring strength of nursing! My hope for Nurses Day 2022 is that our common paths lead to a healthier, safer world.
Please let me know how NLM can join you on this journey.