During National Nurses Week, a reflection on nursing in the pandemic and plans to continue spotlighting the global contributions of nurses and midwives.

Photo courtesy of Jhpiego, by way of International Confederation of Midwives.

One photo shows a proning team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago turning a patient. The photo that accompanies this post shows a midwife in head-to-toe personal protective equipment as she provides breastfeeding counseling to a woman wearing a mask and holding her newborn in a hospital bed in Kabul, Afghanistan. A third focuses on more than 150 white clogs—each pair representing a nurse’s life lost during the pandemic—placed on the lawn outside the U.S. Capitol.

Reflections on the essential care nurses provided this year.

These are just some of the images included in the May issue’s feature article, “A Look Back at the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.” This photo-essay highlights the diverse experiences of nurses and midwives globally in the last year and the variety of ways they responded to these circumstances.

The photos depict resilience—a group of nurses and physicians with their names and smiley faces drawn on the back of their PPE as they start a shift on the COVID unit at a hospital in Rome. And they also depict sadness and shock. Said one nurse, who was photographed during a vigil in Oakland, California, for a colleague who died of COVID:

“Janine was an exceptional nurse. She was funny, she always helped. She was our friend, she was our sister, she was our coworker. I can’t believe she is gone.”

Spotlighting the work of women nurses and midwife leaders.

A sidebar included in this article reports on a list of ‘100+ Outstanding Women Nurse and Midwife Leaders’ that was unveiled in February. It carries on where the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife left off, celebrating and recognizing the work of not only those on the list but of all women nurses and midwives.

Highlighting the contributions of women health workers, who make up 70% of the global workforce, is essential to clarifying their role in global health, according to Roopa Dhatt, executive director of Women in Global Health, which created the list with several international health and nursing organizations.

“Not acknowledging that the default health worker is female means that no priority is given in addressing gender and equality. We know there are workplace policies that are modeled on men’s lives. We know personal protective equipment remains modeled on men’s bodies. These are all realities we must address.”

Read the photo-essay, “A Look Back at the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife,” and view a gallery of the photo-essay images for free through June 1.