Remarks by President McAleese at the 25th anniversary conference of the ICHN
Remarks by President McAleese at the 25th anniversary conference of the Institute of Community Health Nursing The Grand Hotel
Dia Dhibh a Chairde and thank you very much for your very warm welcome. I am very pleased to be here with you today as the Institute of Community Health Nursing celebrates its 25th anniversary. I would like to thank your President, Caitriona Duignan and your conference co-ordinator, Gráinne Lynch for inviting me to address you on this very special occasion.
Today we are celebrating the silver anniversary of the foundation of the ICHN but, of course, the history of community-based nursing goes back much further, at least as far as 1876, when Lady Plunkett founded St. Patrick’s Home for District Nurses in Dublin. In those days the district nurses were obliged to ‘live-in’ while they were training. They were well-known in the community and easily recognisable with their blue uniform dress, white starched apron and a navy blue coat that often billowed in the wind as they travelled from house to house on their bicycles. And long before them, our communities had the tradition of unofficial community nurses and midwives, local women who through circumstance and inclination became skilled in delivering babies or caring for the ill.
Nursing and midwifery in the 21st century have transformed to meet the current healthcare needs of society and community nursing has certainly come a long way from the early days of the district nurse on her bike. The profession is no longer exclusively female. The focus has shifted to a primary care strategy, an emphasis on keeping people well and supporting people with chronic disease so that they can live in the community rather than in institutional care. Whether it is changing a wound dressing, attending a home birth, offering advice and reassurance to anxious first-time parents, helping patients and their families deal with chronic illness or providing the palliative care that allows people choose to spend their final days at home rather than on a hospital ward, you provide a life-enhancing service that puts the individual human person right at the heart of the healthcare system. Your help gives people hope that they can cope and that there is effective, professional, accessible help available to them.
Of course, this continuing shift from hospital to community-based care has placed you all at the centre of care delivery for large numbers of patients. As a result, you have a wonderful opportunity to promote, advance and influence quality and safety in the community as part of dynamic, patient-focused, multi-disciplinary teams. You work in partnership with individuals, families and communities and are well-placed to deliver interventions aimed at improving the health and social well-being of the local population. Many of you deal with our most vulnerable communities. Such a level of interaction has to be personally demanding and at times draining of your resources of patience, stamina and compassion. Yet it is the good that you do, even in the most difficult of circumstances, which time and again renews your vocation and reenergises you as you see revealed over and over the positive difference your presence and only your presence is capable of making.
Over the past 25 years, the Institute of Community Health Nursing has developed into a strong professional organisation whose members have a common goal of healthcare development. You are in a privileged position in that, in the majority of cases, you care for your patients and clients in their own homes. You, therefore, have an almost unique opportunity to provide nursing care in a family setting and, from that “hands on” experience, you are very well qualified to advise on what are the most effective ways of supporting patients in the home.
The theme you have chosen for your conference “Achieving Quality and Safety in the Community” reflects not just your priorities but crucially those of your clients for it is their welfare that is your core vocation and they come in all ages, genders and conditions and whoever they are they look to you for the reassurance, guidance, assistance and care that your name promises. To enter their homes, to offer that care in their homes is to establish a very special familial relationship very different from many other institution based forms of health care. You become a friend, trusted, welcomed, looked forward to. You are their conduit and guide through the maze of problems and changes they face and of course, to be able to do that to the highest standards of professional care, you have to be fully up-to-date. So not only do you have to look after your patients but you have to look after your own professionalism well too – taking care of it, upskilling, developing, growing, innovating. New initiatives like the Advanced Nurse Practitioner posts in the community are born out of the scholarly research and reflection on your everyday experiences as community nurses. Here at this Conference your sharing of those experiences will distill into a new level of insight and wisdom from which will come the next steps towards even better services.
Your anniversary coincides with the 150th Anniversary of the first publication of Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing and the Centenary of her Death (1820 – 1910). We know how she revolutionized nursing but we also know that her work was only beginning. The starched white apron has given way to the single-use latex gloves in line with today’s infection control protocols but the professional insistence on offering the best possible care remains the same because the curiosity about how that care can be improved remains as intense today as in her day.
May this conference be an opportunity to enjoy each other’s company, to learn from each other and to return to your work with renewed enthusiasm, fresh ideas and new networks through which to develop even better practice in the years ahead. I thank you for making such a difference to the lived lives of so many in our community and I wish you well as you continue to dispense excellent healthcare along with human comfort and compassion, with or without a prescription! Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.