National Nurses Week 2026 closes today — May 12, Florence Nightingale’s 206th birthday — with the American Nurses Association marking its 130th year as the profession’s primary advocacy organization. It’s a milestone worth pausing on: 130 years of a profession fighting for recognition, compensation, and working conditions that allow nurses to actually do their jobs.
To mark the anniversary and the week’s close, Congress issued a bipartisan proclamation formally declaring 2026 The Year of the Power of Nurses, recognizing what the ANA has been arguing since 1896: that nurses are not support staff for physicians — they are a distinct, highly trained clinical workforce that is the backbone of patient care at every level of the healthcare system.
What 130 Years Looks Like
The ANA was founded in 1896 — before penicillin, before IV therapy, before anything resembling modern ICU care existed. In the 130 years since, the organization has championed the shift from task-based nursing to evidence-based practice, established the Nursing Code of Ethics, fought for Title VIII funding that supports nursing education and workforce development, and most recently, added a provision to the Code of Ethics specifically addressing artificial intelligence and machine learning in clinical care.
Today, the nursing profession counts more than 5.7 million licensed nurses in the United States. That is the largest single healthcare workforce in the country — larger than physicians, PAs, and NPs combined. The ANA’s 130-year journey maps directly onto the expansion of that workforce from a few thousand trained nurses in the late 19th century to a profession that now manages the overwhelming majority of direct patient contact in every care setting.
The Week’s Highlights
Nurses Week 2026 opened May 6 with the largest landmark-lighting activation in the event’s history. More than 200 iconic locations worldwide illuminated in red, including One World Trade Center in New York City, the Zakim Bridge in Boston, Niagara Falls, and international sites including the American University of Beirut Medical Center and the Saudi German Hospital in Jeddah. The visual campaign under the ANA’s “Power of Nurses” theme was designed to make visible a workforce that is often functionally invisible in public discourse about healthcare.
Senators Jeff Merkley and Representative Lauren Underwood formally introduced the congressional resolution honoring the ANA’s 130th anniversary, citing the organization’s record of “advocacy, ethical leadership, and relentless work to advance” the profession. The resolution acknowledges nursing’s role not just in patient care but in healthcare policy, public health infrastructure, and community health — a framing that reflects how the ANA has positioned the profession’s future.
The Policy Backdrop
The celebratory framing of Nurses Week 2026 exists alongside a difficult policy moment. Title VIII nursing programs — which the ANA has defended for decades — face a proposed $47 million cut in the House Appropriations budget. The CMS nursing home staffing mandate was rescinded before it could take effect. And the NCSBN’s most recent workforce survey found 40% of nurses plan to leave the profession within three years.
The ANA’s 130th anniversary celebration isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in the middle of a workforce crisis the profession has been warning about for the better part of a decade. The bipartisan proclamation recognizing nurses’ contributions is meaningful — but as every nurse on the floor knows, recognition and resources are different things. The question heading into year 131 is whether the political infrastructure the ANA has built over 130 years can convert that recognition into policy wins on staffing, compensation, and practice authority that the data increasingly shows are necessary to keep nurses in the profession.
Today, on Florence Nightingale’s birthday, 5.7 million US nurses are working a shift. Some of them are watching landmarks light up red on their phones between patients. Most of them just need adequate staffing and a salary that reflects what the job actually demands. The 130-year fight for that hasn’t ended — it just looks different than it did in 1896. The profession is bigger, the data is clearer, and the policy tools exist.