Visiting nurses are health care heroes dedicated to service in the ultimate caring profession. For over a century, the Visiting Nurse Associations (VNAs) have provided cost-effective and compassionate home and community-based health care to individuals, regardless of their ability to pay for services. Last week, I joined with Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) to introduce a bill establishing National Visiting Nurse Associations Week. VNAs are founded on the principle that the sick, the disabled and the elderly benefit most from health care when it is offered in their own homes. I have accompanied visiting nurses on numerous home health visits in recent years, including one to an elderly Maine couple who were able to remain in the home they had shared together for fifty years because the husband received home health care. Home care is an increasingly important part of our health care system. The kinds of highly skilled — and often technically complex — services that the VNAs provide have enabled millions of our most frail and vulnerable patients to avoid hospitals and nursing homes and stay just where they want to be — in the comfort and security of their own homes. These associations literally created the profession and practice of home health care more than one hundred years ago, at a time when there were no hospitals in many communities and patients were cared for at home by families who did the best they could. VNAs made a critical difference to these families, bringing professional skills into the home to care for the patient and support the family. VNAs were pioneers in the public health movement, and, in the late 1800s, their work meant milk banks, combating infectious diseases, and providing care for the poor during massive influenza epidemics. Today, that same responsiveness means caring for the dependent elderly, the chronically disabled, the terminally ill, and providing high-tech services previously provided in hospitals, such as ventilator care, blood transfusions, pain management and home chemotherapy. Health care has come full circle. Patients are spending less time in the hospital. More and more procedures are being done on an outpatient basis, and recovery and care for patients with chronic diseases and conditions have increasingly been taking place in the home. Moreover, the number of Americans who are chronically ill or disabled in some way continues to grow each year. Once again, VNAs are making a difference, providing comprehensive home health services and caring support to patients and their families across the country. Through these exceptional organizations, 90,000 nurses and nurses' aides dedicate their lives to bringing health care into the homes of over four million Americans every year. VNAs are truly the heart of home care in this country today, and it is time for Congress to recognize the vital services that visiting nurses provide to their patients and their families by enacting this resolution establishing National Visiting Nurse Associations' Week.