When Dylan, a young man from Bermuda who had spent nearly a year in the hospital, approached his 21st birthday, the clinical team at Franciscan Children’s in Boston knew no medication or monitor could give him what he needed most. He missed school, his family, and his friends. So his nurses made some calls and on his birthday, wheeled him outside to find a Boston Fire Department fire truck waiting and firefighters and police in full uniform ready to celebrate him. 

“The smile on his face was just so incredibly worth it,” says Brittany Ryan, a pediatric nurse practitioner at Franciscan Children’s who has spent a decade caring for children with complex, long-term medical needs. For weeks afterward, Dylan wore his fire hat everywhere and showed everyone the photos he’d taken with Boston’s finest.

It’s the kind of moment that doesn’t show up on a vital-signs monitor or in a predictive algorithm — it’s the kind of moment that defines what nurses do. 

This year’s Salute to Nurses arrives at a turning point in health care as hospitals across Massachusetts — and the country — accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and digital tools. Technology is saving lives, and nurses will tell you so. But they will also tell you something else: the more advanced health care becomes, the more essential the human connection at its center is. 

Smarter tools, deeper presence

Predictive tools for conditions like sepsis can now synthesize lab values and vital-sign trends in minutes, flagging danger long before a human could piece the data together. Monitors watch over neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) babies around the clock. Even advancements in ventilators and augmentative communication devices are helping children with complex conditions thrive in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. 

Mary Samost, assistant dean of the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at MGH Institute of Health Professions, sees both the promise and the tension in exponentially advancing technology. These tools are designed to keep people safe and help nurses manage enormous workloads, she says. But they also carry a risk: pulling nurses away from the bedside.

In nursing school, students are now trained to narrate what they see on a screen so patients feel included, to maintain eye contact, to know a patient’s name and story, not just their diagnosis. At MGH Institute, nursing students practice difficult conversations with standardized patients, actors who push them to listen deeply and respond thoughtfully in a safe environment before they face those moments for the first time in a real unit. 

Human connection, Samost argues, is not an optional or soft skill. It’s a clinical intervention with measurable impacts. Research has linked nurse-delivered psychological support to significant reductions in patient anxiety and depression. Studies have found that when providers show greater empathy, chronic pain patients report decreased symptoms. And nurse-led care interventions have also been shown to shorten hospital stays.  

At Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, oncology nurse Brianna O’Brien watched technology free up time that once vanished into paperwork — time she now spends with patients. But she’s clear about what screens can’t do. Her patients arrive in one of the most vulnerable states imaginable: diagnosed with something beyond their control and unsure what comes next. Some days they need medical teaching. Other days, they need someone to celebrate good scan results. And sometimes, they just need silence and a steady presence. 

“Knowing the context and reading the room, empathy, compassion, intuition — all of those things are irreplaceable,” says O’Brien, who has worked at Dana-Farber for eight years specializing in head, neck, and genitourinary cancers. 

The bridge between fear and understanding 

When patients leave a specialist appointment struggling to process what they’ve just heard, it’s often a nurse who sits with them afterward and walks them through it — as many times as they need.

Duyen Chau, a special care nursery nurse at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, knows how it feels to need that bridge. While growing up in Vietnam, she cared for her mother undergoing cancer treatment. It was then she decided she wanted to help people who are suffering. She arrived in the United States in 2017, earned her nursing degree from University of Massachusetts Boston, and found her way to the special care nursery.

In the NICU, babies communicate through cries and body language, as well as numbers on a monitor. Chau watches all of it. But she watches the parents, too. She notices when a mother looks different halfway through a shift or when a father grows quiet after a doctor’s update. She earns trust not through a single conversation but over days and weeks, as families who arrive in panic gradually open up, share their stories, and begin asking for help. 

“I think I’m a bridge,” Chau says. “I’m a connection between the family, the baby. I will advocate for my patients, their parents.”

Ryan sees the same dynamic at Franciscan Children’s, where some patients stay for years as families navigate specialists, therapists, and difficult decisions. Parents, she says, are an integral part of the care team — and when nurses invest in that relationship, families are far more willing to engage in even the hardest conversations. 

“So much of what we’re doing is like, ‘Let’s go through what was discussed. Let’s talk about a plan. What does this mean long term?’” Ryan says. “And having those conversations as much as they need to because it takes so much time to process.” 

Why human connection isn’t going anywhere

O’Brien has learned that the trust patients place in a familiar nurse unlocks something no algorithm can: honesty. When patients trust their nurses, they might admit they don’t understand their medication schedule, reveal a new symptom, or ask hard questions. And that honesty, O’Brien says, can drive better outcomes. 

When Chau thinks about the future of human connection in nursing, she thinks about the parents who send cards months after their babies go home or sometimes even bring them back to visit — bigger, healthier, unrecognizable from the fragile newborns she once held. 

“Human connection [is] sharing, helping, hearing, empathizing, comforting them, helping them through one of the most difficult times,” she says. “They need someone. They need a hug, sometimes a big hug.” 

As Samost put it: “When you’re sick, you want a person.” 

While machines continue to advance health, nurses will always be there making sure true care remains.