Social impact

Celebrating Healthcare Heroes this International Nurses Day

Today marks International Nurses Day - and it couldn’t come at a more important time as we continue to rely on healthcare workers to keep us healthy as we battle COVID-19. 

To help celebrate, we’re encouraging our members to share a post to thank nurses around the globe using #NursesWeek. Try mentioning a nurse that has had a direct impact on you.

Helping to fill critical healthcare roles

As healthcare providers work around the clock on our front lines, we are committed to doing everything we can to help them find the people they need to meet the growing demand for these critical services, including allowing them to post their urgent hiring needs to post jobs for free on LinkedIn, and alerting members who have those skills.

To date, we’ve received requests from nearly 2,000 organizations in 25 different countries to help fill 200,000 healthcare and essential services-related positions, and 550,000 applications on LinkedIn have helped to fill these critical, frontline jobs. We’ve also expanded our Recruiting for Good efforts, bringing on new partners such as Uber, SAP, Relativity, Okta and SmartRecruiters to source and screen talent for organizations on the frontlines, including more than 700 hospitals globally.

Bringing together healthcare experts to give and get help 

We currently have 6.65M healthcare professionals on our platform globally, including 1.5+ million registered nurses in the U.S. alone. Over the past few months, we’ve seen some captivating perspectives and engaging conversations happening across Linkedin related to the healthcare industry - whether it’s hospitals and research labs searching for candidates to join their teams ASAP, healthcare professionals sharing their insights and stories from the front lines as they combat COVID-19, or members cheering these professionals on from the sidelines. 

As more people look to those in the healthcare industry for advice we’ve seen a 19% increase of messages sent to healthcare professionals compared to last year, and likewise messages sent from healthcare providers and nurses have grown 20% and 22%. At the same time, we’ve seen a significant increase in healthcare workers taking Linkedin courses. For example, there’s been a 138% increase in healthcare workers watching courses on resilience.

We’ve also seen a spike in conversations and dialog happening on the platform - it’s no surprise that #Healthcare has been a trending topic on LinkedIn with a 39% increase in healthcare-related posts week over week as of the end of March 2020. 

Here are a few examples of some of the conversations and discussions we’ve seen on the platform:

  • A member posts a video from her daughter, an emergency room nurse in Ottawa, Canada, being greeted as she leaves the hospital by other frontline workers applauding her work on the frontlines.

  • Paula Cartagena, a Patient Care Coordinator in New York, shares an inspiring story of a 25 year old patient being extubated successfully and Facetiming his mother and brother from the hospital. 

  • Olayinka Odujole, a nurse in the UK, was very candid in a recent post about feeling overwhelmed and overworked. She talked about the many pressures facing healthcare workers globally and spoke frankly about professional therapy and how it could be necessary for those in her profession.

  • Ian Batterbee, a member in the U.K., shares how he is thanking, and showing support for healthcare workers during COVID by providing free financial management consults.  

  • The World Health Organization regularly streams Live on LinkedIn, hosting media briefings and Q&A’s. They recently conducted a Q&A on vaccines and immunization with Dr. Katherine O’Brien, Director of Immunizations, Vaccines, and Biologicals. 

Interested in staying in the loop on all things healthcare? 

You can see our special edition of the Top Voices list, which features the health care experts that are lighting up LinkedIn right now to cover the COVID-19 pandemic — sharing what they’re seeing, what’s coming next, and offering insights on what all of us can and must do. 

If you are looking to volunteer, find a job on the frontlines, or request help for an urgent healthcare hiring need, you can find all of the information here