The system didn’t break nursing. It is breaking nurses

As nurses around the world mark this year’s International Nurses Day, the profession’s theme carries the weight of a promise: “Our Nurses, Our Future — Empowered Nurses Save Lives.” But for those of us working inside this profession, the slogan lands differently. The ground reality we inhabit daily forces a harder question: Is there a future here? For many nurses, the theme feels less like a rallying call and more like a quiet indictment of everything that has remained unchanged  and, too often, everything that feels as though it never will. 

I used to genuinely look forward to this day. I grew up with a quiet pride in nursing, advocating for it, believing in the purpose behind it. But somewhere between the ideals I carried and the reality I now live, something shifted. Something that is forcing me to rethink my life choices.

This year, the day arrives wrapped not in celebration but in exhaustion and frustration. In the feeling of being vulnerable when you were trained to be strong, overwhelmed when you were meant to be composed, undervalued when you have given everything, hopeless and powerless, in a profession that was built on hope and healing. I didn’t expect to feel this way. But here I am.

A young nurse leading the health ministry; a moment that felt historic and hopeful and yet on the ground, nurses are still overworked and underpaid, still threatened and none of actions taken. They are still unheard and still asked to carry burdens that no single human being was supposed to carry alone. 

The weight of being a nurse doesn’t begin at the hospital door itself; it begins long before that. Nurses pour years of their lives and huge financial investment into their degrees, and while carrying the cost of that education forward into careers that return little in wages and even less in respect. But no one talks about trying to survive on low wages while the cost of everything around you keep rising. No one talks about the irony of spending the life ensuring the health of others while your own health insurance as staff remains inadequate, uncertain, or sometimes non-existent. The people who care for sick and dying are often one health crisis away from financial collapse themselves. And the cruellest irony of all when we fall sick we are expected to find our own replacements, or simply show up anyway, working through it on medication, because the system has no room for a nurse who is also human. Even after serving selflessly, they are made to feel they should be grateful simply for having the privilege of doing so. Nursing and nurses are not just their uniforms we have lives beyond the ward and hospital. We have families to feed, rent to pay, dreams that exist outside of a hospital. We deserve to live with pride, dignity and respect inside and out. 

I grew up admiring Florence Nightingale, and I still respect what she stood for, but I no longer want to romanticize her story. Because living under the shadow of that ideal, the selfless, silent nurse who endures everything without complaint, is doing damage. Not to the idea of nursing, but to the people who show up every single day to do it.

Maybe this profession was built on caring, serving and nurturing to the vulnerable but was never meant to be sustained by destroying the ones who give the care. They continue to save lives while silently fighting battles of their own-battles with burnout, with fear, with a system that rarely protects them. 

Perhaps this Nurses Day should be about more than applause and carefully polished words. Perhaps it should be the moment we stop handing nurses flowers for a day and start giving them something that actually matters: safety, fair wages, protection, and the dignity of being heard.

If this day means anything, if we are to hold any ideal worth keeping, let it mean this: the future of nursing cannot be built on the silence and suffering of its nurses.

And perhaps the question that weighs most heavily is the one I can no longer avoid: Do I still belong here? 

I, someone who believes that work must be done with compassion, who entered this profession with enthusiasm and a genuine love for what nursing stands for, who wanted the freedom to take responsibility, to advocate for what is right and fair, to serve others with dignity, do I still belong here?

Not because I have lost my values. But because this system has made it nearly impossible to live them.

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