José Ramón Calvo, full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED) and president of its Institute of International Cooperation, participated on May 22 at the ceremony of delivery of the Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale awards, a recognition promoted by the Sandra Ibarra Foundation and the Nursing Department of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) that aims to give visibility and highlight the good work of the nurses of oncology units of the hospitals of the Community of Madrid. These distinctions also try to vindicate the importance of listening to patients, since they have been the ones who, by voting in more than twenty hospitals in the Community, have decided which professionals to grant their recognition.
The event was held in the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Medicine of the UAM and was conducted by the journalist and writer Yolanda Guerrero. The presidential table was constituted by the rector, Rafael Garese; the ambassador of the United Kingdom in Spain, Simon Manley; the councilor for Health of the Community of Madrid, Enrique Ruiz Escudero; the care manager of the Madrid Health Service, María Lourdes Martínez; the dean of the School of Medicine, Juan Antonio Vargas; the president of the Foundation, Sandra Ibarra, and the director of the Nursing Department of the UAM, Eva García Perea.
Calvo gave a brief motivational dissertation addressed to the nursing professionals present at the event and concluded his speech with an audio with the voice of Florence Nightingale that generated great emotion among the attendees. Florence Nightingale was the precursor of professional nursing and gives name to the oath that Nursing professionals perform when they graduate. She is known as the Lady with the Lamp following an article published by “The Times” in 1855 about her work with the wounded in the Crimean War in which they explained how she visited her patients at night with a lamp oil in hand, careful, to monitor their condition without disturbing them.
