Every year on May 12th, the whole world focuses on nurses celebrating their professional holiday – International Nurses' Day. This year, the Faculty of Medicine (MF) of Vilnius University (VU) welcomes this day with special joy and pride. Last year, for the first time, Lithuanian nurses and nursing students had the opportunity to participate in a nursing competition project sponsored by HM Silvia, the Queen of Sweden. The winner of the competition was Karolina Adomavičiūtė, a second-year nursing student at VU MF. She won a six-thousand-euro scholarship, an individualized internship and a Letter thank you from the Queen of Sweden, which will be presented at the Royal Palace in Stockholm.
Karolina Adomavičiūtė.
Nurses have always played a vital role in healthy societies, but in 2020, as global health was pushed to the brink, the extraordinary work of nurses around the world took center stage. As nurses around the world continue to perform vital service, administrating vaccines and meeting with the challenges of long-term illness and ongoing COVID-19 isolation, we hope to inspire you to listen and to hear from them, to empower them, and to thank them for their heroic ongoing act of sustaining healthy societies.
The Queen Silvia Nursing Award was established in 2012 in honor to Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden’s many years of advocacy for nurses as well as the quality of care for older people and people living with dementia. The theme for the 2020 cycle was COVID-19 care in healthcare environments.
Karolina Adomavičiūtė won the Queen Silvia Nursing Award by submitting her idea "Voice Letters" to the competition. “During the pandemic, oral communication between patients and nurses has declined due to high risk of infections. Patients often press the call button as they lack attention, communication, or support; and this has become even more apparent due to the restrictions on outside visitors,” Karolina said.
From the left: Kristina Judine, Barbora Butkutė, Karolina Adomavičiūtė, Svetlana Gečienė, prof. Natalja Fatkulina, prof. Vaiva Hendrixson, prof. Algirdas Utkus.
By her, for nurses this presents a particularly stressful situation in which they are providing support and oftentimes non-health related information continuously along with the procedural and documentation work that must coincide with the call.
The idea of Karolina was to facilitate patient to nurse communication and other healthcare professionals while avoiding potential infection risk with face-to-face contact. “With “Voice Letters”, a patient can send a voice mail to the nurses station, where the team can receive and document the request. The nurses would like be able to assess the urgency of the message and prepare a response accordingly.” Karolina believes, that this form of communication would be more useful than the usual call button, as oftentimes it is unclear whether the request is urgent or not.
On the occasion of the International Nurses' Day, Karolina wishes to her colleagues, teachers, research friends, nursing science and practice specialists, researchers, lecturers, students, volunteers to feel the importance of this work, respect and support, public gratitude on a daily basis: “Let's be healthy, happy and patient. Let’s share innovative professional experience and don’t forget to find time for dreams and their realization. And let's enjoy life and be proud of our noble and honorable, the best nursing profession in the world!”.