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International Nurses’ Day: Ten facts about Florence Nightingale and Red Cross nurses

By Katrina Crew
May 12, 2011 at 2:16 pm

Every year on Florence Nightingale’s birthday (12 May), the world recognises the fantastic contribution nurses make. Happy International Nurses’ Day!

1. Florence Nightingale inspired our founder, the Swiss businessman and philanthropist Henry Dunant, who said: “Though I am known as the founder of the Red Cross and the originator of the Convention of Geneva, it is to an English woman that all the honour of that convention is due. What inspired me to go to Italy during the war of 1859 was the work of Miss Florence Nightingale in the Crimea.”

2. World Red Cross Day used to be celebrated on 12 May, in honour of Florence Nightingale’s birthday, until 1934. We now celebrate World Red Cross Day on 8 May, Henry Dunant’s birthday.

3. Since 1912, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been awarding the Florence Nightingale medal to exceptional nurses.

4. The British Red Cross employed nearly 6,000 trained nurses during the First World War, most of which (nearly 5,000) worked in hospitals in the UK. At the beginning of the war, our staff nurses were paid £40 per annum (worth £1,722.40 today). Their salaries increased by £10 with one year’s consecutive service (£2,153.00 today).

5. During both world wars, we had thousands of volunteers called voluntary aid detachments (VADs) who performed first aid and basic nursing duties in UK hospitals and overseas.

6. At the end of the First World War, Spanish flu swept across Europe. Red Cross nurses and VADs who had been treating wounded soldiers now found themselves nursing people ill with the highly contagious flu – and many caught the illness themselves. The Red Cross Journal from 1919-1920 includes a startling number of obituaries for our nurses, including one about a VAD named Miss Long, describing how she “nursed through the war at the Esher Red Cross Hospital, where she never missed a day, and was the most devoted worker; this is in addition to domestic work at her home. On demobilisation, she went to nurse village families during the influenza epidemic, contracted the disease, and died on Easter Day. It is on such foundations that the British Red Cross is built”.

7. Between the wars, trained nurses and volunteers set up first aid posts for motorists – as there were more cars on the road, leading to more accidents – and for hop pickers and fishermen and women. They treated the common injuries these workers suffered, helping them avoid infections.

8. During the Second World War, the Joint War Organisation (made up of the British Red Cross and Order of St John working together) operated 250 convalescent hospitals, auxiliary hospitals and residential nurseries in the UK.

9. The Red Cross continued to provide nurses to help in hospitals for decades after the National Health Service (NHS) was founded in 1948. Hospitals often called on Red Cross volunteers during emergencies, epidemics and busy times (like Christmas), and to cover staff leave.

10. Although the British Red Cross doesn’t have a trained nurses department anymore, we send healthcare professionals to work overseas after disasters, and we have volunteers in the UK who provide health and social care services in their communities.

One nurse, Gwen Wilson from Sheffield, is working in a refugee camp in Tunisia on the Libyan border. Read about her work in the The Star.

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Tags: First World War, florence nightingale, Henry Dunant, history, International Nurses' Day, nursing, Second World War, Spanish flu

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