Category Archive: The Voice

Special Report: The Florence Nightingale Legacy

On the 200th anniversary of her birth, today’s nurses are guided by her pioneering commitment to data and her devotion to healing. By Anjetta McQueen Thackeray and Jeff Rogers By the time nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale was in her early 30s, she was running a hospital. She had just gotten started. From there, she developed statistics and sanitation to cure diseases in a Crimean battlefield hospital while taking time to comfort wounded soldiers, then returned to Victorian England where she transformed health care—making lasting changes that have prepared today’s nurses for the great challenge of our time. May 12 marks the 200th anniversary of Nightingale’s birth. In her honor, the World Health Organization has designated 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife—it’s also become the year of COVID-19. “Many of us planned to celebrate the Year of the Nurse,” said Becky Sassaman, RN, BSN, HNB-BC, a Denver-area nurse leader in UFCW Local 7. “We went from celebrating to being present in this moment, a moment we could not have imagined months ago.” The legacy of Florence Nightingale is needed now more than ever. Nurse researchers, front-line caregivers, and national health care labor leaders agree Nightingale’s cautions, practices, and predictions have come to new light in the age of COVID-19. “She is very much a contemporary,” said Denise Duncan, RN, president of UNAC/UHCP. “If she were alive today, she'd still be talking about infectious disease, hand washing, sanitizing, all of the things that are as pivotal today as they were when she was in Crimea.” Real data, real news Dr. Ann Mayo, leads research ranging from gerontology to medication errors “When I first learned about Florence Nightingale using statistics to communicate what she was observing in her daily practice, that really piqued my curiosity,” said Dr. Ann Mayo, RN, BSN, MSN, DNSc, professor and nursing researcher, Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science, University of San Diego. Mayo has studied the little-known but revolutionary role Florence Nightingale played in the development of applied health statistics and public health education during the Crimean War. The volunteer nurse arrived at a battlefield hospital in 1854 to find horrors such as wounded soldiers drinking water from a well with a dead, rotting horse in it. She and her nurses cleaned up the ward and started collecting data at the bedside. Before they got there, the field hospital had a combined death rate from disease of 42.7 percent. Their sanitation measures dropped that to 2.2 percent. Nightingale, along with a statistician mentor, William Farr, developed the coxcomb charts—an enhanced pie chart—an early infographic to show the real story: more soldiers were dying of preventable diseases bred in filthy conditions than from the wounds of battle. “She could use these to communicate to the public,” said Mayo. “It was a visual that really made a lot of sense to them. She went into hospitals in London and collected all kinds of statistics. She crunched all the numbers, published her reports, and she had a great impact on public health in London.” Read More