As a nurse, you are usually tending to patients, assisting physicians, and answering questions from family members. However, you also have responsibilities that have nothing to do with your patients. You may be attending continuing education classes, responsible for the monthly calendar, make a weekly newsletter for your unit, or be required to complete any number of tasks that require creative thinking and publication. One way to add focal interest to your creative endeavors is with clip art. Finding nursing and medical clip art is just one more way you probably don’t want to spend your time or energy. To make your life easier we have compiled a list of some of the best free nursing and medical clip art sources available online.
Microsoft – Microsoft maintains an extensive collection of free downloadable clip art on their website. This link will take you to the query result for the keyword nurse. However, using situation specific search terms such as hospital, doctor, medicine, pediatrics, and ambulance all produced excellent results.
Discovery Education – While this site is designed for educators, they have numerous resources of interest to nurses and other health professionals. This specific link is the health and safety clip art section, although they also have many other sections that may be useful.
History of Medicine – This collection is maintained by the National Library of Medicine and includes historical images of the field of medicine. There are images of doctors, nurses, patients, medical equipment, diagrams, and cartoons.
Food and Health – This site is organized by month, but you can also search by using specific keywords. In addition to images depicting healthy lifestyle options such as exercise, fruits and vegetables, and health related promotions there are also holiday specific graphics.
Public Health Image Library – This is a comprehensive collection of medical images including patients with specific health conditions, lab images, and procedures. Many of the images are quite graphic and may be more suitable for training purposes rather than decoration. However, there are some images depicting health and safety, the proper use of equipment, and historical photographs that could be more widely used.
Finding free clip art and images for nurses and others in the field of medicine can be challenging. Many sites have limited offerings, are overzealous in their use of advertisements, or have questionable security associated with their downloads. These resources are from reputable organizations and government agencies and offer images of the highest quality.
What website do you turn to if you need medical images? Do you prefer illustrations or photographs and what do you find yourself looking for most often?