Just midway through the work week, there’s been time set aside to break bread, heal hands and even share ice cream sundaes for nurses at Naval Hospital Bremerton.

As well as continue to provide caring, compassion and competence to patients in need.

For the approximately 95 nurses assigned – including nearly 50 Navy Nurse Corps officers – NHB/Navy Medicine Readiness Training Command Bremerton is celebrating National Nurses Week, May 6-12, 2024, which culminates with the Navy’s Nurse Corps 116th Birthday from their initial date, May 13, 1908.

The American Nurses Association theme for 2024, ‘Nurses Make A Difference!” is a continual concept at NHB, whether it’s providing quality health care at home or applied when tasked for deployments.

Last year alone NHB nurses were called to provide support at a number of locales, such as locally with Madigan Army Medical Center, haze-gray underway assigned to Pacific Partnership 2023; to the Central Pacific at U.S. Naval Hospital Guam; helping at NMRTC Twentynine Palms and NMRTC Camp Pendleton; in the Caribbean at U.S. Naval Hospital Guantanamo Bay; onboard USS Nimitz (CVN 68) and in U.S. Central Command area of operations.

NHB Nurse Corps officers handle a host of specialties as part of their overall duties, including family nurse practitioner, executive medicine, nurse anesthetist, clinical nurse, perioperative nursing, maternal child, ambulatory, medical surgical, critical care, and pediatric nursing.

Although May 13, 1908, is the official Navy Nurse Corps birthday date and follows National Nurses Week - May 12 is also a significant date to all nurses. It’s the birthday of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the founder of modern nursing. It was just two years before Nightingale passed away that then-President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Naval Appropriations Bill, May 13, 1908, to authorize the establishment of the Nurse Corps as a unique staff corps of the Navy.

Applications to the Nurse Corps were sent to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery from around the nation. Candidates were required to travel to Washington, DC, at their own expense and take an oral and written examination. The nucleus of this new Nurse Corps was a superintendent (Esther Hasson), a chief nurse (Lenah Higbee), and 18 other women—all would forever be remembered as the “Sacred Twenty.”

Projecting back 116 years ago when the Navy Nurse Corps came into being, Naval Hospital Bremerton was a 16 bed, wooden, two-story frame building used as ‘Sick Quarters’ on Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. America’s involvement in World War One was still a few years away.

In those times and in those conditions, such as now, the Navy Nurse Corps compassion, character and competence were demonstrated in all they did, and all the care they provided.

Just as it is today.

Story originally posted on DVIDS: NHB/NMRTC Bremerton Nurses - Making a Difference at Home and Away