NOT FOR NURSES ONLY!

Pioneering Ideas guest post by :

Patricia Flatley Brennan RN, PhD,  Project HealthDesign National Program Director

 

The Institute of Medicine released its blue ribbon panel's report on the future of nursing yesterday, raising the call for nurses to lead change and advance health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing advanced four recommendations, paraphrased here: (1) let nurses do what they know how to do; (2) accelerate educational advancement through an educational system that promotes seamless academic progression; (3) step forward as full partners in health care redesign; and (4) systematically account for and deploy the nursing workforce in a manner that best meets the needs of society.

 

THESE RECOMMENDATIONS ARE NOT FOR NURSES ONLY! In fact, achieving the bold vision of health care, advanced by the panel, requires active engagement with other clinicians, the business community and health policy makers. Melding the interests of the health sector with the industrial sector will not only lead to innovations in the ways nurses practice and the manner in which they exert leadership, but also insures that these alliances will result in the power to create change.

 

Everyone stands to gain when nurses do what they are prepared to do, when innovations in educational systems not only create new beginning practitioners, but also helps them transition from novice to expert, when redesign of the health care system emerges from collaborative models of practice and when the human capital of health care, properly enumerated, is distributed in a balanced and principled way.

 

Come along and join the initiative – there is room – indeed, a need, for everyone!