Delegates at our 2018 National Nursing Forum partaking in one minute of applause for nurses
Every single minute, in every single country in the world, nurses are providing their patients with vital, high-quality health care services. Nurses are the backbone of the health care system and without them it would be impossible to meet the growing demands on health and aged care across the globe. Nevertheless, ignorance about the scope of nursing and the ensuing lack of respect and recognition for our profession present challenges to nurses everywhere.
1min.care, a global awareness campaign originating in Germany, aims to address this issue by encouraging groups around the world to get together and applaud nursing for one minute each to raise the profile of nursing and celebrate our profession. The goal is to gather 1,440 one-minute clips, which will total 24 hours of continuous applause, symbolic of the number of hours a day nurses are dedicated to caring for their patients.
The Australian College of Nursing (ACN) was proud to be an early adopter of the initiative and the first Australian organisation to take part. This video from our 2018 National Nursing Forum captured the moment 430 delegates enthusiastically broke out into applause for nurses. The Winter 2018 edition of our quarterly print publication The Hive also featured an article by our regular columnist Elizabeth Matters FACN, which passionately illustrated how 1min.care provides nurses with a much needed emotional lift.
To date eight hours of applause have been collected from groups around the world, some of which have been collated in this Facebook video. We strongly support the project’s aim to promote greater recognition of nurses and would love to see more participation from Australia! We encourage you to get involved by gathering groups of people, whether it be a few colleagues in the lunch room or hundreds of delegates at a conference, recording one minute of applause and uploading the video to the 1min.care website. When uploading, please note you will need to click the button on the centre of the page to translate it from German to English.
