International Nurses Day: Celebrating Our Care Worker Colleagues

Abstract

The theme of the 2025 International Nurses Day, happening on Florence Nightingale's birthday on the 12th of May as it always does, is Our Nurses: Our Future (https://www.icn.ch/news/icn-puts-wellbeing-nurses-centre-international-nurses-day-2025). Most nurses around the world work with paraprofessional care workers whose work we registered nurses supervise. Among care workers are nursing assistants, home health aides, health care assistants and personal care attendants. Securing our future and the health of older populations around the world requires that we registered nurses recognise care workers and the contributions that they make to the care of older people and their care partners.

Care workers are indispensable members of our gerontological nursing team. Under our direction, they expand the reach of gerontological nursing. These colleagues provide personal care that supports the health, function and well-being of older people. Together, we and care workers support older people in their homes and throughout most of their encounters across the full range of health and social care settings. Celebrating the contributions of care workers and leveraging our skills to help them improve their work with older people is more vital now than ever before.

Care workers is a term that encompasses a range of roles. Unfortunately, those roles are often labelled idiosyncratically within institutions and from country to country, making care workers less visible to nurses, other health professionals and the public. The variability of role titles and vagueness connoted by the label ‘care workers’ point to some of the challenges that these health and social care staff members face regarding their role preparation, continuing education and training, compensation and recognition. Regardless of what their roles are called, we gerontological nurses know that the support and care that older people need cannot happen without the contributions of care workers. This year on International Nurses Day, let us, the global community of gerontological nurses who lead nursing teams caring for older people and their care partners, take time to truly recognise and celebrate care workers through our actions with and for them.

Our effective leadership of the gerontological nursing team that includes care workers is crucial to the health, function and well-being of older people globally. Each of us knows through our experiences in clinical practice, education and research just how crucial well prepared and compensated care workers are to the health and safety of our older populations around the world. Gerontological nurses are uniquely placed to take larger leadership roles in healthcare research, services and education to ensure that care workers receive what they need so that they can give older people and their care partners what they need. Building on what so many of us already are doing, that leadership can help safeguard care workers' preparation, ongoing education and compensation. Their improved preparation, education and compensation plays an indispensable part in guaranteeing better health and social care for everyone's healthy future. In this domain, our leadership can be parsed into recognition, support and gratitude.

Needs for recognition of the care workforce in health and social care for older people are multi-faceted. Too often, as a wide body of literature and anecdotal evidence reveals, care workers are almost invisible to many people in health and social care. Care workers may even be seen as a disposable workforce with high rates of job turnover conveying a lack of regard for the valuable care they provide. They often struggle against low pay, inadequate orientation and education and limited career advancement opportunities. Such disregard stands in sharp contrast to our recognition of these colleagues' impacts on our work and the lives of older people and their care partners. We know that we rely on them in all types of health and social care settings. Deliberately crediting their achievements to those colleagues who are unfamiliar with care workers helps advance the cause of recognising this indispensable group of paraprofessionals. Simultaneously, drawing attention to care workers allows us to highlight their profound influence in positive experiences of health and social care among older people. Critically, older people and their care partners are our allies here. The relationships that care workers form with those in their care are among the most enduring and least celebrated. Engaging older people and their care partners in our efforts to recognise care workers offers tremendous potential for future initiatives.

Our vocal and visible recognition must help mitigate the invisibility and correct the disregard that our care worker colleagues too often face. Advocacy for care workers is needed, now more than ever. Our advocacy for just policies governing care worker roles, education and collaboration is crucial across health and social care settings. Similarly, many societies are currently contending with problems recruiting and retaining care workers to meet present and projected needs. As we do in our workplaces, we must advocate for just policies that serve older people, their care partners, and care workers equitably in whatever region of the world we call home.

Offering support is integral to our nursing identity and actions. Support for others manifests in different ways, depending on our aims and roles in care for older people, their care partners who are family, friends and neighbours, and the care worker members of the nursing team. We gerontological nurses are ideally placed to provide two key forms of support for our care worker colleagues—education and research. First, we are often already delivering the education that these colleagues need to be age-friendly and skilled in their work. Codifying that education through clearly organised curricula enables us to better meet the needs of early career care workers and offer progressive education to those seeking advancement. While most societies identify some level of national curricula for professional nurses and may include specialism in gerontological nursing, few create analogous curricula for care workers. We can close this curricular gap with robustly developed and evaluated educational programmes specifically for care workers.

Specific educational opportunities relevant to care workers are key to advancing our gerontological nursing team's capacity. Substantively, we must educate care workers about age-friendly and planet-friendly health and social care. I wrote about this intersection in a recent editorial, explicating how responses to the dual crises of ageism and our climate are interlinked (Kagan 2025). As we educate ourselves in these domains, we must impart relevant knowledge and skills to care workers while in turn learning from their experiences and concerns. Recent climate-related heat domes and other extreme weather events underscore that, at minimum, care workers need education about emergency preparedness and disaster response, including evacuation procedures. Structurally, apprenticeships are an untapped educational prospect for care workers and nurses alike. We can learn much from our colleagues in skilled trades. Some countries already use apprenticeship models to improve education and transition to practice for an array of professional and paraprofessional health and social care roles. The rich tradition of apprenticeships is helpful in shaping how we approach the simultaneous acquisition of knowledge and skill in parallel with socialisation necessary to achieve role and team performance standards across the gerontological nursing team. Both substantively and structurally, our education for and with care workers must incorporate contemporary forces like the climate crisis as much as it builds on timeless topics like person-centredness.

Education and research in the domain of care worker roles and performance are most effective when interconnected, each activity informing the other. Many gerontological nurses internationally conduct research studies and quality improvement projects focused on and involving care workers every year. Yet the state of the science addressing their roles, scope of care and contributions to the experiences of older people and their care partners remains inadequate to meet current needs in most societies. Notably, the preparation of this editorial highlighted for me the evident need for an international nomenclature for care worker roles and associated role standards to achieve agreement about research, education and service. The engagement of care workers in research, for projects as large as the prospect of an international taxonomy of care worker role scope and responsibilities or as small as an exploration of the experiences among care workers employed in a small group of institutions, is important. Their active engagement in research ensures that all types of studies are well-designed, rigorously conducted and result in improvements in care processes and experiences.

Our gratitude, as gerontological nurses, for the contributions of our care worker colleagues comes in many forms. I am confident that each of us can think back to the numerous occasions when we have thanked our colleagues as individuals and in teams. Now, more than ever before, we need to act on our gratitude for care workers in lasting ways that transcend simple expressions of our thanks. Overcoming ageism and other threats to health and social care requires that we join care workers in a united gerontological nursing team. This International Nurses Day is the perfect opportunity to consider our advocacy, education and research with care workers in mind. How we shape policy, curricula and science, engaging care workers as we do older people and their care partners, helps create the blueprint for our future. Our future must be one of age-friendly, planet-friendly, person-centred health and social care for all people, everywhere. That future can only be achieved with a strong gerontological nursing team where care workers help extend our reach and ensure that older people and their care partners are at the centre of all that we do.

The International Journal of Older People Nursing (IJOPN) has long published research involving and about care workers from countries around the world. IJOPN authors have detailed care workers' experiences, knowledge and learning needs as well as describing results from educational and supportive initiatives. Those research reports are a terrific foundation on which to build as we go forward from this International Nurses Day. We at IJOPN welcome research teams, especially those including care workers, to submit manuscripts reporting descriptive and interpretive qualitative research and those reporting quantitative studies examining education, training and career advancement along with those that help define care workers' influence on the health experiences of older people and their care partners. Additionally, we here at IJOPN would love to read about the other work you are doing in collaboration with care workers across practice, education, research and policy. Share your thoughts, experiences and insights with us on social media. We are on LinkedIn at https://uk.linkedin.com/in/international-journal-of-older-people-nursing-ijopn-10bb6674 and on Blue Sky at https://bsky.app/profile/intjnlopn.bsky.social. Just use the hashtag #GeroNurses when you post and tag us on either LinkedIn or Blue Sky!

The author declares no conflicts of interest.