During Nursing Week, we celebrate the dedication, expertise, and achievements of registered nurses (RNs), registered practical nurses (RPNs) and nurse practitioners (NPs.) This year, for ONA nurses, Nursing Week is being held May 12-18.
Our 2025 Nursing Week theme is:
Raising our voices. Speaking the truth.
Faire entendre nos voix. Dire la vérité.
This theme captures our growing momentum in telling Ontarians the brutal truth. We find ourselves at a crossroads. Never before has it been so important to speak out and speak the truth about what is going on in our health-care system.
Nursing Week offers a great opportunity to do more than celebrate. We can also amplify our concerns and our bold ideas for solutions. We know the value of the experienced and highly skilled nurses in our health-care system, and how it is endangered if we don’t address recruitment and retention of the nursing workforce.
Raising our voices at rallies, marches and other actions is amplifying our voices as nurses and health-care professionals. We are speaking the truth to the public. We are highlighting the huge problems we are experiencing in our workplaces – primarily due to staffing shortages and underfunding. We have the solutions to end the staffing crisis and improve health care for patients, residents and clients.
For the public, celebrating nurses and our work means acknowledging the brutal truths and how we are fighting to make things better. Inherent in our message is the impact we have through our work and our shared fight.
This is why Nursing Week is not only a celebration. It is a time to recommit to the fight for our profession and our public health care. It is a moment to speak out and call on the public to fight like a nurse for safe staffing, safe work, better funding and high-quality public health care for all.
This Nursing Week, unite in solidarity with nurses who provide care in extraordinary circumstances every day and who fight back against understaffing, underfunding, unsafe conditions and privatization. Let us continue to make our voices heard, to strengthen our union and to build a strong and united movement.
Indigenous Nurses Day
During Nursing Week we celebrate Indigenous Nurses Day. Indigenous Nurses Day highlights the achievements of Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis nurses and recognizes their invaluable work improving the health and well-being of Canadians.
Edith Anderson Monture was the first Indigenous registered nurse in Canada. Born in 1890 in Six Nations of the Grand River, the Mohawk woman struggled to be accepted to a Canadian nursing school as First Nations faced involuntary enfranchisement (loss of Indian status) for pursuing higher education. Instead, she studied in New York, where she completed her degree in 1914. She worked as a public health nurse and volunteered for duty as a nursing sister in World War I, eventually returning to Six Nations where she continued to work as a nurse and midwife until the 1960s. Monture is considered a pioneer in Indigenous healthcare in Canada.
Supporting access to high-quality health care for all means supporting and recognizing the unique experiences of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis nurses in our union. ONA strives to create space and support for our Indigenous members through the Members of Indigenous Descent Caucus Group, which meets at our Human Rights and Equity Caucus each year.
