Karen Howell, chief executive, Wirral Community Health and Care Foundation Trust, writes for the Globe.

MILLIONS of nurses around the world celebrated International Nurses Day on Sunday, marking the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale (1820) who is considered the founder of modern nursing.

Here at Wirral Community Health and Care, thanks to the generosity of Fine Fruits Direct and a local cake company (which wishes to remain anonymous!) we had hundreds of goodies delivered across our main bases to celebrate and say thank you to our amazing nurses.

It's been a particularly incredible year here for our community nursing teams, who have delivered some brilliant new initiatives to help provide even better care and support to Wirral patients.

They have introduced new IV clinics, helping to keep people out of hospital as patients can instead have intravenous antibiotics at one of four hubs near where they live or work.

New 'Safety Boards' in our community nurse bases enable all staff and visitors to see photos, names and contact details for staff in that team, as well as compliments, pressure ulcer information and caseload sizes.

Staff have developed a new competency passport, in which they can document the professional standards they have achieved to support their professional portfolio.

And they've been busy aligning teams to GP practices, so that every practice has a caseload manager.

This has already helped to improve communication between community nursing teams and GPs, supporting better patient care.

But it's not just our community nursing teams that we celebrate.

Between health visitors and school nurses to sexual health nurses, specialist nurses, walk-in centre nurses and all our other fantastic nursing staff, they provide outstanding treatment and care 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, whatever the weather!

So it was great to be able to say a huge thank you and well done as we celebrated International Nurses Day.