Thank you to our local nurses during Nurses Week

Nurses have always been there for us, but now they're in the spotlight more than ever.

Nurses Week is celebrated each year starting May 6 and ending May 12, the birthday of Florence Nightingale, a British nurse, social reformer and statistician known as the founder of modern nursing.

As of 1998, May 8 was designated as National Student Nurses Day to be celebrated annually. As of 2003, National School Nurse Day is celebrated on the Wednesday within National Nurses Week each year. According to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, there are more than 81,000 nurses in the state, and DHEC employs approximately 459 public health nurses.
We asked our readers and social media community to send us a photo of their favorite nurse. Here they are.

On behalf of the staff at The Sumter Item and our community, we thank them and all our nurses for their hard work, compassion and dedication to their profession.