‘No one is ‘just a HCA” Nurse goes viral with powerful Facebook post

With more than 103,000 likes and 33,000 shares, Charmaine Briggs's post on the important role by healthcare assistants has clearly struck a chord with the public.

Taking to social media to dismiss the notion that any one position in medicine is more important than another, Charmaine celebrated the team work which goes into treating and caring for the ill.

"Today someone said to me "Why would you want to be a nurse and wipe people's asses for a living? You may as well just be a HCA" This made my blood boil. No one is "just a HCA" for a start," Charmaine began.

"I've been a health care assistant before being a student nurse and you are your patients only support in some cases. We are the staff with the patients 24/7."

"We are the ones changing the beds, changing our own clothes for the fourth time due to other people’s bodily fluids, the ones mopping up the nosebleeds and cleaning comodes on a loop," she reminded the public.

"We are up close and personal with our patients – we hold their hands when they fear the unknown, we listen to them when they need someone to talk to, we’ve cried with them. We work around the clock 365 days of the year, we sometimes sit with patients who have no family so they simple don't pass away alone."

Highlighting the impact the job has on the individual doing it, she continued: "It is physically and emotionally challenging, and one day you'll need that help from "just a health care assistant" not just when you're old, you don't know what tomorrow holds."

"Nurses save lives everyday. I don't know if people think it is only doctors who save your life but it's really not the case. Everyone comes together as a team and doctors wouldn't be able to do their job without nurses, as nurses wouldn't without HCA's."

"Some people really do need to stop and think what they say to people, as one day you might need that life saving help from the people you run down," she finished in a post which has been widely lauded since its upload at the beginning of the week.

Charmaine has been inundated with messages of support since taking to social media with her message, with one user writing: "Thank you. We HCAs get overlooked and put down a lot. You being a nurse and sticking up for us front line workers really made my day."