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Congratulations to all of my nursing colleagues as we celebrate National Nurses Week. It is important that we take time to pause to recognize the valuable contributions that nurses make each and every day. The focus of this year’s Nurses Week is Culture of Safety: It Starts With You. Nurses understand the critical nature of keeping our patients safe. No matter where they practice, nurses have a professional charge to maintain the safety for patients, families, clients and all who seek our care and services. We must remain ever vigilant of that responsibility. Patient safety is imbedded in all of AONE’s competencies for nursing leaders. 

It is a core value of AONE’s work as well. And, although the celebration this week honors nurses and remembers Florence Nightingale’s birth, we know that it is the whole health care team that creates the environment in which we care for others.  Let us all remember what Florence said in 1863 and heed her words.

“It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as a first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.”

Thank you to all nurses for remembering her words and following in her footsteps.

Maureen Swick, RN, PhD, NEA-BC
AONE 2016 Board President