The historical evolution of the regulations for the Florence Nightingale Medal
Article Category: Review article
Published Online: Mar 26, 2018
Page range: 1 - 5
Received: Oct 20, 2017
Accepted: Nov 20, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/fon-2018-0005
Keywords
© 2018 Shanxi Medical Periodical Press
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Objective
This study aimed to explore the 100-year changes in regulations for the Florence Nightingale Medal.
Methods
We used the announcements of the Florence Nightingale Medal awards as the research object to analyze – via historical and inductive methods – the regulations for receiving the Florence Nightingale Medal.
Results
In the award years, the greatest number of winners per award year was 71 and the lowest was 12. The medal was initially exclusively awarded to living people but evolved to include both living and deceased people. The recipients were balanced among all countries. The gender of the winners showed a changing trend from being limited to only females to including both males and females. There was also a shift from emphasis on only dedication of the recipient to equal emphasis on both dedication and innovation.
Conclusions
The selection criteria for recipients of the Florence Nightingale Medal evolved from consideration of those showing only dedication to equal consideration of both dedication and innovation.