National Student Nurse Day is celebrated on May 8 as part of National Nurses Week. It’s a day to appreciate the courage of student nurses as they take on the highly challenging and competitive field of medicine. The nursing education that student nurses undergo is different from that of other students. Aside from theoretical learning in classes, student nurses apply their knowledge through practical experiences such as administering medications, charting, nursing care, and patient assignments. Student nurses can specialize in various nursing fields, including clinical nursing, burn care nursing, education, mental health nursing, nurse practitioner, and midwifery. Upon completion of their studies, student nurses have to take certification exams before becoming registered nurses.
Nursing education has changed over the years, moving from a more practical approach to learning how to integrate diverse medical-related fields and research that has allowed nursing schools to produce nurses who are not inferior to physicians but can work as equal members of a medical team.
Before the advent of traditional nursing education, student nurses trained as apprentices at religious institutes such as convents. Then, in 1860, Florence Nightingale founded the first general training school for nurses at St Thomas’ Hospital. The school’s curriculum was designed around nursing practice and the need for hygiene and task competence. Nightingale’s model went on to dominate nursing education for the entirety of the 20th century before it was replaced by the philosophy, “service first, education second.”
The outbreak of the civil war in the United States made the country realize the importance of nursing and the need for nursing education. The role that individuals like Dorothea Dix and other women nurse volunteers played in the war led to the establishment of various nursing schools in 1873. That includes Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing, New Haven Hospital’s Connecticut Training School, and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Boston Training School. In 1888, Darius Mills founded a male-exclusive nursing school in Bellevue Hospital, New York. That helped diminish the notion that nursing was a female-only field.
The 1900s brought about innovations in nursing education. That includes remote learning, a standard nursing curriculum, a personalized feedback system for various nursing programs, and the pilot of nursing-associate degrees in different schools of higher education.
The onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 further transformed medicine, which had a ripple effect on the nursing profession. It led to the advancement of telehealth and technology in the medical field.
