Nightingale’s year of nursing: rising to the challenges of the covid-19 era

There is much to celebrate on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, social reformer, statistician, pioneer, and founder of modern nursing.1 She laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of the first secular nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her popular but overly romanticised image as “the lady with the lamp” in Scutari during the Crimean war is widely known, and her influential Notes on Nursing and Notes on Hospitals remain respected works.2 Less well known are her proposals for fundamental social reform of the poor laws and workhouses into precursors of the welfare state and her role as a pioneer statistician.

Despite criticisms, mythologising and demythologising, Nightingale’s legacy endures and continues to influence contemporary nursing.3 The NHS Nightingale Hospitals for patients with covid-19 were named for good reason. She envisioned a public healthcare system based on health promotion and disease prevention and was unafraid to challenge outdated systems and practices, be they from the military, medical, or political establishment. And yet, it is exactly this kind of influence her profession needs more than ever. Nurses today make up the world’s largest healthcare workforce. They have the potential to transform how care is delivered—but only if they can be unshackled from what the profession has become.