(ABC 6 News) – All this week has been National Nurses Week, an annual celebration of the men and women hard at work in hospitals, clinics and care facilities across the country. Here in the Med City, that included workers of the Charter House.

It was a beautiful day for a big splash, as the staff of the Mayo Clinic operated senior living facility got the chance to drop their bosses into a dunk tank to cap off the week dedicated to them.

“We wanted to show them that we, as leadership, are engaged,” said Charter House Director of Nursing Alejandra Zambrano. “We’re close to them, so that’s why we’re doing the dunk tank here. Each nurse can come and dunk their own supervisors.”

The nurses of the Charter House vary in experience from fresh faced newbies like Mikaela Thelen, whose only been working there since 2022, to long time veterans like Brittney Semling, who has 15 years in the bank.

Regardless of time, though, both know how challenging the job can be.

“I know I can’t please everyone, every day but I try to please as many as I can and that sometimes gets hard,” says Semling.

But satisfying all the same.

“It’s rewarding to take care of people and get to know new people and it’s always fun working with other nurses,” says Thelen.

It’s been a big year for nurses and other healthcare workers, with advances made both locally and across the state.

In April, the Service Employees International Union of the Saint Marys campus were awarded a new contract including raises and a lower cap on mandatory overtime hours to roughly 1600 workers.

RELATED: SEIU members celebrate success in arbitration ruling

At the state level, the recently passed Department of Human Services budget guarantees a raise for nursing home workers too.

Not everything in the budget is as beneficial, as about $300 million worth of cuts are also included over the next two years.

Most of that includes reducing payments to nursing homes and pushing the cost of some services onto county governments.

But that simply highlights how much we should appreciate our nurses and healthcare workers for all that they do and work through.

“I think the fields of nursing deserves it,” says Semling. “I think any appreciation, any raises, any acknowledgement – they all deserve it.”