Our cover story this week is International Nurses Day.  The theme for 2017 is “Nursing: A voice to lead – Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”. Nursing, according to Oxford dictionary, is the job or skill of caring for people who are sick or injured. Nurses, to-day, has firmly been established as an important and integral part of health delivery. It may be said that nursing has by now become a noble profession all over the world.
Apart from being a noble profession, nursing is a specialist’s job. On one-hand, it involves commitment, compassion and care of the highest level; on the other hand it demands specialized skill sets, quality training and constant up gradation of knowledge. The care and comfort a nurse provides is like the ways of nature – a unique blend of selflessness and absolute feeling. A nurse lends her healing touch at a time when we are at our worst-helpless and very resentful about it. It takes the highest sense of commitment to be able to serve in such a condition. And a nurse is oriented towards doing just that.Call them angels in white and in comfortable shoes, or one of the few blessings while ill, nurses are well-nurses, one of a kind, a few in a billion. However, in the back drop of the above, when the questions of competency of the nurses in medical profession arise, we can say that as a third world nation, whatever problems we have in the competency level in other profession, we have the same problems in our nurses.