Profile: Elderly nurse in east China receives prestigious international award

NANCHANG, July 5 (Xinhua) -- On July 2 (Beijing Time), Zhang Jinyuan, 94, received the 2023 International Achievement Award at the International Council of Nurses Congress held in Canada. It is the first time a Chinese nurse has won the prestigious global award.

However, it was not the first time that Zhang was lauded by the medical community. Twenty years ago, Zhang was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal.

Born in 1929 into a wealthy family in the eastern Chinese city of Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, Zhang once led a life of affluence and privilege. By chance, she read about Florence Nightingale, who devoted herself to the noble cause of nursing. Zhang then made the decision to leave behind her carefree life for a rewarding career as a nurse.

In 1951, she began her decades-long nursing mission. Even after her retirement in 1992, Zhang was unable to stop thinking of those in need of care.

In 1999, she called upon her colleagues to help her establish a volunteer nursing service center in Jiangxi, which was in 2002 named the Jiangxi Red Cross volunteer nursing service center. It provides care services at the community level for vulnerable people in need of medical aid.

In 2010, Zhang started a volunteer group named after Nightingale in Nanchang, and four years later she registered another volunteer group named after herself. Today, nearly 20,000 volunteers provide free care services under Zhang's guidance.

Several volunteer nurses in their 70s and 80s are very familiar with Zhang's work style. According to senior volunteers, Zhang's rigid requirements and demands for accuracy in their work illustrate how she remains responsible for her patients. Nurses and volunteers are asked to clean bed pans before putting them on shelves and to examine patients prone to bedsores regularly.

Hu Junjie, 21, recalled how Zhang and her team aided his father in muscle recovery and how they applied medicine many years ago. Hu is a postgraduate student at Wuhan University in central China's Hubei Province, and now volunteers with Zhang's teams every break between semesters.

"I have grown up under the care and help of my nurse grannies. How could I not join them to help more people?" Hu said, noting that his current research at the university concerns the application of artificial intelligence in medical services.

Zhang's selfless devotion to nursing has made her a grandmother to many, and her own family is supportive of the difficult and time-consuming career she has chosen. "My grandma doesn't know how to cook or do housework at all. But she has devoted her all to the noble cause of helping others. She is my idol," said Yu Qing, Zhang's granddaughter, who works at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Yu has chosen to focus her research on music therapy, for the very same purpose as her grandmother: to help more people.