Printed from: https://archive.cmf.org.uk/resources/publications/content/?context=issue&id=6165
The traditional image of Florence Nightingale is that of a willowy woman with a white bonnet, dark dress and miraculously clean pinafore, carrying a lamp aloft, mopping fevered brows of adoring, injured soldiers as she walked her rounds at Scutari Hospital. The 'Lady of the Lamp' of popular mythology was...
Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or cold marble, compared with having to do with the living...
2020's designation as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife by the WHO was nothing to do with Coronavirus. The initiative came because entering 2020 signalled a decade left to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 goals that all UN Member States agreed to strive...
2020 is the Year of the Nurse and Midwife And what a year it's turning out to be?! The WHO say we are 'the backbone to every health system' And during this pandemic the backbone has held the weight of our national health system Protected vital services Flexing, extending, moving With nurses coming out...
An entrepreneur, a nurse, a mother to many. At the time, her renown matched Florence Nightingale's. Loved and then lost to history, the remarkable endeavours of Mary Seacole have only in recent years been re-acknowledged in British culture. The brave and ingenious Seacole faced war and epidemics to care for...
Chief Kofoworola Abeni Pratt was a pioneer and a leader. Kofoworola was born in 1915 in Lagos, Nigeria, under British colonialism. From childhood, she wanted to become a nurse, but was discouraged by her father, so she became a teacher. She then married Dr Olu Pratt, a Nigerian pharmacist who...
I am currently working on a project to develop Parish Community Health Visitors (PCHVs) working in a very impoverished and marginalised Catholic community of some 30,000 people, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I was out in Pakistan originally to help set up a nursing college, working in a partnership between PRIME [1]...
Who would have thought when the World Health Organisation designated 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife that it would prove to be so poignant? This year has increasingly seen nurses and midwives, and indeed all health professions, in the public eye. We have been portrayed...
I had been to church as a young person, but it was as a student nurse that I became a true Christian, accepting the Lord as Saviour in the linen cupboard at Brighton General Hospital! A missionary nurse working in India, had come to visit the ward as part of...
'When they said 2020 was the year of the nurse they weren't joking' - this quip made me sigh and smile wryly when it rolled by on Facebook last spring, but I also remember clearly thinking 'the year of the nurse? I had no idea!' Recently I asked a few...
I was born in my parents' home town in New York but spent most of my childhood in Australia. After high school I decided to take a gap year and spend some time with my grandparents who lived in the UK. I'm still here and just starting my final year...
We've heard in this Spotlight that, despite it being 'Our Year' for nurses and midwives, it's turned out to be an unusually tough and challenging one. So, to help us celebrate and encourage each other, we're holding our first-ever national gathering, (online) on Saturday, May 15th. It's called NAMfest (Nurses and...
What a momentous year it has been! But not quite the momentous year that The World Health Organization (WHO) imagined when it dedicated 2020 to nurses and midwives, celebrating our work across the globe, and highlighting our role in achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. You can read more about...
As CMF, we are part of the NCFI family (Nurses Christian Fellowship International), the worldwide Christian nursing fellowship. For a bit of background info, NCFI globally is broken down into six regions, our own being Europe. Most of the stronger fellowships here are in the Nordic countries (Finland, Denmark and...
I have wanted to be a nurse in French-speaking Africa since I was 16 years old but I couldn't have imagined the adventure God would take me on when I walked up the gangway of the world's largest civilian hospital ship. The command to love God as well as love...
