Nurses are the backbone and largest profession in the World’s healthcare industry, with a population of over 3 million. Nurses, who are consistently named as the most trusted profession year after year, are increasingly important not only in providing treatment but also in the administrative side of healthcare.

Nursing’s Evolution as a Profession

Nurses, believe it or not, have existed for nearly two millennia, but in a quite different function than they do now. Nurses in the past typically lived and worked in convents and early church-run hospitals, delivering treatment that was at best rudimentary and sometimes in deplorable conditions.

In the 1800s, notable personalities such as Florence Nightingale began to push for better working conditions and training. Nightingale knew that developing the nursing profession was vital to improving healthcare after witnessing personally during the Crimean War that the majority of those who died did so not from wounds incurred in battle but from infections caused by unclean circumstances.

However, as revolutionary as her work and subsequent campaigning were, she spoke about the matter to anybody who would listen, even taking her message to the Queen of England – nursing would not resemble the profession we know today for another 100 years or so.

Nurses’ roles and education have evolved significantly in the ensuing years, with hospital diploma programs gradually falling out of favor while Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) and Associate of Degree in Nursing (ADN) degrees became the norm.

With the push for higher educational standards came more professional organizations as well as a number of advanced nursing professions requiring master’s and even doctorate degrees, such as nurse practitioner and nurse anesthetist.

To satisfy these demands, many prominent colleges have begun to offer Accelerated BSN programs, which allow non-nursing bachelor’s degree holders to receive quality nursing degrees in a fraction of the time it would take to complete a standard four-year program.

In today’s healthcare, nurses play an important role

The general population has historically been supportive of nurses. Professional respect in the medical community, on the other hand, was earned via many years of lobbying, organization, and, most crucially, academic advancement. Nurses were once thought of as little more than order takers for doctors, but that is no longer the case.

Nurses are now in charge of providing food and drugs, changing beds, and bathing patients, among other things, and they have considerably more authority and responsibility, as well as a more collaborative relationship with physicians and other members of the healthcare team. It’s also for a good cause. Patients trust nurses more than doctors (or any other profession, for that matter), making them an important link between doctor and patient.

We need to look at what nurses do to understand why they are so vital in today’s healthcare, from the relationships they create with patients to the ways they collaborate with other practitioners. Visit cosmetic courses for nurses to know other related roles a Nurse is capable of.