At Gratia, every week is Nurses Week, but during National Nurses Week we get a special opportunity to join the world in shouting a little louder, applauding a little prouder, and pausing to truly honor the heartbeat of healthcare: nurses.
From May 6 to May 12 each year, Nurses Week celebrates the past, present, and future of nursing, rooted in the legacy of Florence Nightingale and reflected in the everyday heroes who show up with skill, compassion, and grit in every patient interaction.
But for us at Gratia, this isn’t just a calendar event; it’s personal. Nearly 1 in 3 nurses plan to leave the profession due to burnout, understaffing, and feeling undervalued. That’s not a staffing problem. It’s a motivation crisis.
Gratia was built on a bold belief: great care shouldn’t go unseen. And yet, too often, it does. We’ve seen too many incredible nurses' daily acts of kindness and clinical excellence lost in the noise of a busy shift. We’re here to change that. We built Gratia to help healthcare organizations not just say thank you, but show it, every day through timely recognition, smart incentives, and behavior-based reinforcement that actually drives change.
Nurses week has been more than celebration, it’s about visibility. It’s about making the invisible work of nurses visible, and giving healthcare teams the tools to recognize, reinforce, and reward the behaviors that drive quality care, team culture, and patient trust.
Each year, National Nurses Week brings awareness and appreciation to the vital contributions of nurses through events, shoutouts, stories, and small acts of kindness: thank-you notes, coffee runs, surprise treats. It’s a reminder that recognition doesn’t have to be grand to be meaningful. Sometimes a simple “you mattered today” goes further than we think.
Gratia makes that kind of real-time recognition possible every day, not just during Nurses Week. Whether it’s a patient submitting a thank you, or a teammate making a Shoutout after a tough shift, our platform ensures that appreciation reaches the right person, right away.
This week, we’ve seen an outpouring of shoutouts from patients, from peers, and from leaders. Stories of nurses who stayed late, spoke gently, led with purpose, or simply showed up when it counted. It’s been inspiring—and affirming. Nurses aren’t just delivering care. They’re shaping culture.
If this Nurses Week has taught us anything, it’s that when you give people a way to share gratitude, they will. When you give nurses a moment to be seen, they shine. And when you make it easy to celebrate the people behind the badge, you strengthen not only your team, but your outcomes.
As one CNO told us this week: “Nurses aren’t just our biggest workforce — they’re our biggest opportunity.” We agree. That’s why we design every feature of Gratia with one goal in mind: to motivate, support, and retain the people who make healthcare work.
The 2025 Nurses Week theme calls us to elevate the voice of nursing, and we’re here to help amplify it. Through positive reinforcement, peer recognition, and behavior-driven engagement, we’re turning appreciation into action. Because when nurses feel seen, supported, and proud of the work they do, everything else improves: patient experience, team collaboration, safety, and retention.
So, to all the nurses out there, thank you. You do extraordinary things in the most ordinary moments. Gratia sees you. And we’re committed to helping the world see you too.
