On International Nurses Day, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is celebrating our nurses and their skills, compassion and empathy as they accompany patients throughout their healthcare journeys, from new life to end-of-life, wherever they are.
Nurses are the cornerstone of healthcare around the world and are fundamental to MSF’s medical-humanitarian action. MSF relies on the dedicated efforts of more than 10,000 nurses worldwide—the largest professional group within our operations—to provide essential healthcare.
Often working in their own communities, nurses also carry the weight of collective challenges, but provide important support to people’s resilience as well.
The global healthcare worker shortage is acute among nurses. Low-income countries have a ten-times lower density of nurses compared to high-income countries, based on the State of the World’s Nursing report in 2025. Meanwhile humanitarian emergencies displace healthcare providers and disrupt the systems they work within, endangering people’s access to essential care and their lives.
“I've seen incredible demonstrations of humanity in the midst of this, and that's coming from nurses,” says Jean Stowell, inaugural Chief Nursing Officer at MSF. “It's nurses who are following these patients and they're also following a lot more patients than is reasonable in many cases. And I think we forget that, in their day-to-day, they're seeing a lot of trauma… I'm always so incredibly proud to see how nurses in MSF still maintain their humanity, and I think that's sort of a remarkable trait.”
This package marking IND 2026 features storyholders:
• Lidah Fikaoussou Felicite, nursing activity manager, Mweso, DRC
• Djibril Ouedraogo, nurse supervisor, Dedougou, Burkina Faso
• Susan Adingo, palliative care nurse (MoH/MSF), Homa Bay, Kenya
• Abdularahman Arour, burns unit nurse, Atmeh, Syria