Get Inspired

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Florence Nightingale became the model for how nurses innovate, thanks to her revolutionary hygiene practices during the Crimean War. After working in desperate conditions at the Army hospital in Scutari Turkey, Florence and her medical team improved its facilities from top to bottom. They cleaned the wards, set up a kitchen, and provided wounded soldiers with the first form of what’s now known as “quality care.”

As a result, far fewer patients died from hygiene-related diseases, prompting hospitals all over the world to formally adopt Florence’s practices — practices that are still used today.

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Like her predecessors, Elizabeth Kenny had no formal nursing education, but she would still be remembered for her breakthrough treatment of polio. When “Sister Kenny” (a name she earned in the Australian military) saw her first polio case, she had a hypothesis: that the patient’s limbs were stiff but not permanently paralyzed.

Unaware that stiff braces were the accepted medical treatment at the time, she used hot packs and encouraged gentle movement. This method re-taught patients how to use limbs that had been only temporarily paralyzed by the virus, revolutionizing the treatment of the disease.

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Adda May Allen was a nurse at Columbia Hospital in Washington D.C. when she invented disposable liners for baby bottles. Realizing that babies often struggled to feed from traditional bottles, Adda created a disposable, collapsible liner that hospitals and moms at home could use once then throw away. It made it easier for babies to suck milk by eliminating the vacuum that traditional bottles created, working like a bag that closed in on its sides as a baby drank.

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African American nurse, Bessie Blount Griffin, was also a physical therapist and a forensic scientist. But she’s best known in the nursing community as the inventor of the electronic feeding device. While working at the Bronx Hospital in New York, Bessie invented an electric self-feeding tube for amputees, which could transport individual bites of food to a patient's mouth. All the patient had to do was bite down on the tube and the food would dispense from an attached machine.

Bessie would later design a neck frame for injured or ill patients that could hold a bowl or cup close to their face as a "portable receptacle support."

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Sister Jean Ward made a simple observation about sunlight that would lead to the most common clinical treatment for jaundice in infants. As Sister Jean was caring for newborns — during her time as head of the Premature Unit at Rochford General Hospital in Essex, England — she realized that sun exposure greatly reduced jaundice and its effects on the skin and liver.

This discovery led to neonatal phototherapy, a practice that safely and effectively treats the condition by exposing babies to artificial UV light.

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Elise Sorensen was the innovator behind the first disposable ostomy bag, which helps patients with post-surgery stomas feel more comfortable doing everyday things. Following her sister’s ostomy operation — a procedure that removes the end of the intestine through the abdomen, allowing waste to exit through a surgically-created stoma — Elise designed a new way to manage stoma leaks.

Instead of the metal capsules or fabric and rubber bags that were used at the time, Elise designed a disposable bag that was attached with an adhesive ring, a predecessor to the devices we use today.

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As an OR nurse, nursing supervisor, and member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Anita Dorr had a breadth of experience that she used to invent the first crash cart. After WWII, Anita went back to work as an ER nurse at Meyer Memorial in Buffalo, New York. There, after spending days carrying supplies back and forth, getting delayed every time there was an emergency, Anita leveraged her husband’s carpentry skills to invent the “Emergency Nursing Crisis Cart.”

Today, it’s more commonly called a Crash Cart. And they're so essential that nurses customize them to their professional needs and even personal tastes.

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The Wong-Baker FACES® Pain Rating Scale — or happy to sad faces, as many know it — was created by Donna Wong and Connie Baker to help children communicate pain. As pediatric specialists, Donna and Connie worked with young patients to help them cope with illness or injury.

In the hope of creating an effective pain assessment tool, patients were asked to think back to their own experiences and draw facial expressions to show how they felt when they experienced different levels of pain. Each face was unique, but soon, a pattern developed, becoming the modern-day rating scale we use today.

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In the early 1980s, nurses Cliff Morrison and Alison Moed Paolercio did what few other people in the U.S. would have dared: establish a new standard of care for patients in the country’s first dedicated AIDS unit. HIV/AIDS was an epidemic that also brought with it an epidemic of hysteria, fear, and marginalization. When the disease was spreading faster than information could be obtained, nurses at San Francisco General Hospital defied medical conventions to treat “untouchable” patients with a truly innovative approach to care.

In Wards 5B and 5A — wards specifically dedicated to HIV/AIDS — nurses put themselves at personal risk to stand beside patients as they faced painful symptoms and, oftentimes, death. It revolutionized hospital care at the time in the US and around the world, and proved instrumental in gathering data that transformed the disease from a fatal prognosis to a manageable condition.

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After over 30 years of nursing experience, Teri Barton-Salinas and her sister, Gail Barton-Hay, put their observations into a unique innovation: color-coded IV lines. Noticing that there can be a number of hazards using clear, indistinguishable intravenous lines — let alone multiple lines, in some cases — Teri hypothesized that using different colors would make the insertion and removal process much easier.

ColorSafe IV lines now allow nurses to more quickly and accurately identify a patient’s IV, especially in emergency situations when every second counts.

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Throughout her career, Rebecca Koszalinski has been helping the speech vulnerable communicate. Mostly recently with her Speak For Myself-Voice app. Building on her background as a clinical instructor, researcher, assistant professor, and app developer, Rebecca created the Speak For Myself-Voice app. It helps disabled patients, such as those diagnosed with cerebral palsy, clearly communicate in clinical situations, like when they’re left unattended and find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

As a result, Speak For Myself-Voice is now in the hands of those who need it most, so there can be open and effective lines of communication between friends, family members, healthcare providers, and the most vulnerable patients.

Find Speak For Myself-Voice in the app store

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In the spotlight of National Nurses Week, nurses Abby Hess, Lauren Wright, and Tram Pham became the first awardees of the Naxlex Nurses Innovate QuickFire Challenge. When Abby first started working as a nurse in the pediatric post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) of Cincinnati Children’s, she heard a valuable piece of advice: Kids who fall asleep fighting, as they’re given anesthesia, often wake up fighting.

To make that process easier, she and her team created a breathing-controlled video game using anesthesia masks that provided a more engaging way to help kids practice being induced before surgery.

Halfway across the country, Lauren and Tram were researching how to prevent dysbiosis — a disruption in the gut microbiome that affects over 4,000 babies a year. They learned that increasing breast milk consumption can establish immunity, so they turned to overcoming a common breastfeeding barrier: nipple confusion.

To make sure babies who are used to being bottle-fed can return to the breast, they invented the Natural Nipple, which 3D prints the shape of a mother’s nipple.

Learn more about the Natural Nipple

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From medical grade masks to new, color-coded methods of communication, nurses like Ellen Smithline and Jessica Latham, have been on the front lines, developing innovative responses to COVID-19. After 35 years of nursing — including first-hand experience with Ebola, SARS, and emergency care — Ellen paused her PhD program to work as an isolation tents nurse manager in communities hit with COVID-19.

There, she put her crisis training to work by collaborating with her ground team to create a laser-cut shield from a single sheet of flexible plastic that can be worn over an N95 mask, curbing the need for goggles. No assembly required.

Likewise, Jessica used her years of experience as an ICU educator to create “Code Cards” that helped pass important messages within her Covid-19 ICU quickly and effectively. Once the pandemic started to create more stressful conditions in her unit, Jessica’s team needed a way to keep the code team informed and those outside of the room unexposed. Within an hour of identifying the problem, they created laminated "Code Cards" with the most common medications and procedures, ready for use across ICU areas.

Meet 10 Nurses pioneering COVID-19