This National Nursing Week, we need more than supportive tweets and well wishes

This First Person article is the experience of Yvonne Sam, a retired nurse and health-care advocate who lives in Montreal. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

We are in the midst of National Nursing Week, with the theme this year being #WeAnswerTheCall, developed by the Canadian Nurses Association to display and flaunt the many roles that nurses play in a patient's health-care journey. The current pandemic and ensuing health crisis has certainly shone the spotlight on the vital contributions nurses make globally.

In Quebec, communities have witnessed that regardless of the day or the circumstance, nurses have tirelessly continued to provide safe, high-quality assessment, intervention and care. They have adapted to new roles, in multiple settings to ensure safety, while continuing to provide the nursing services most needed among those whom the pandemic has made clear are most vulnerable.

Like so many others in my profession, I felt called to be a nurse. Even though retired, I still remain a nurse — advocating for nurses and tutoring nurses in training. Although I loved my career as a nurse, nursing is not without its challenges and stresses. Inadequate staffing remained an ongoing challenge, a fact that contributed greatly to feeling stretched thin and overworked.

Fewer nurses on duty simply translates into a heavier workload. For a nurse who takes the care of her patients seriously, it is frustrating not having enough time to devote to each individual patient, or to interact compassionately with families. It was mentally and emotionally draining to feel unable to provide adequate care and always feeling rushed.

If there is one standout feature that defines nurses, it is their ability to think on their feet. Not only are they on the front line, but additionally, perpetually on the brunt line. Nurses have stepped up, they have answered the call.

Now we are calling on lawmakers to step up, too.

This National Nursing Week, the second during the global pandemic, instead of supportive tweets or well wishes, we are calling on lawmakers to do something that nurses actually need. Pass legislation that prioritizes the physical health and mental well-being of Canadians to honour all our nation's nurses. Let National Nursing Week be extended to a full month.

Now more than ever, it is important to raise the visibility of the critical work nurses do. Honouring our nation's nurses has become more profoundly significant as they continue to work in a pandemic, making a month of recognition even more well-merited.

Never have our jobs been more critical, never have they been more dangerous. Every day, we risk our health along with that of our families in order to keep the country safe, even in the presence of the government's initial failure to provide the required tools to do the job safely.

Although life as we know it has changed, the core character of nurses has not. But no one imagined that the critical importance of nurses in our society would have been brought so sharply and clearly into focus, by an unwelcome and unknown virus — COVID-19.

Nurses are the heart of health care. We have answered the call, and you have heard us all. Will the lawmakers respond?

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