The Nightingale Initiative for Global Health, or NIGH, is a grassroots, nurse-inspired movement to increase global public awareness about the priority of health and to empower nurses and concerned citizens to stand for a healthy world everywhere.
There are more than 15 million nurses worldwide. However, NIGH's recent research reflects that there is still a poor awareness of the critical role played by nurses in society. Individually, each nurse is already committed to promoting the health of people, wherever they can. But, only a few have used their voices to effectively impact health on global scale. If individual nurses can come together worldwide — with citizens who are also concerned about health — this effort could indeed become a powerful force for the health of humanity.
Individual Commitments to Achieve a Healthy World
At the core of NIGH's Initiative is the Nightingale Declaration Campaign. This Campaign is being created, step by step, through individual signatures of commitment from around the world. As you sign the Nightingale Declaration, you are joining more than 19,000 people from 106 nations who have already signed — these include many midwives and other healthcare workers. This renews your commitment to what you can do and are already doing — both personally and professionally — to make a difference in the world at a challenging time.
Those who sign the Nightingale Declaration believe the achievement of a healthy world to be the priority objective for action by ordinary citizens, by civil society organizations and by all governments, local and national.
In Nightingale's Footsteps
NIGH recalls and celebrates the legacy of Florence Nightingale, the "Lady with the Lamp" who began her nursing career during the Crimean War and went on to establish the foundations of modern nursing and nursing education. Nightingale also became an articulate public communicator, community and social activist, environmentalist and ardent advocate for human rights and worldwide social reform. She influenced local, national and international leaders and fought to keep the issues related to health in the public eye. She called all of this "nursing."
Following in her footsteps, NIGH is developing strategic themes for achieving a healthy world. These themes include: personal health and renewal, healthy home and work environments, cross-cultural understanding, international health diplomacy, environmental and social determinants of health. As these themes are developed, NIGH will be seeking to bring together many stakeholders in collaboration and working partnership — to address the global nursing shortage — as well as to better understand and impact upon other relevant global health issues.
Calling For New Collaborations — The International Year of the Nurse, 2010 As a Launching of the UN Decade for a Healthy World, 2011 to 2020
Over the coming months, also watch our evolving Campaign News, featuring stories of how NIGH is working to accomplish these goals. As you sign the Nightingale Declaration, you are joining a growing team of collaborating individuals and organizations, calling for the world to celebrate a 2010 International Year of the Nurse (2010 IYNurse). This special Year — the Centennial of Florence NIghtingale's death — is being created as a catalyst to appreciate and better understand the contributions nurses are making, and have made, to each of us.
This year-long Celebration is part of an emerging global collaboration — that NIGH is joining — on behalf of nurses and concerned citizens across the world — for “Mobilizing Public Opinion for the Health of Nations” at the United Nations and with UN Member States. We see this endeavour as an essential foundation to gather global consensus to "achieve a healthy world by 2020."
All these collaborations support the adoption — by the United Nations General Assembly — of a resolution declaring human health as the priority agenda for discussion, decision and strategic action by all UN Member States.
Creating the Future With Our Lives
Author Peter Drucker has given us an idea we apply every day as we build the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health and the Nightingale Declaration Campaign. He has challenged us to remember that "the best way to predict the future is to create it." For those of us who are nurses, much of our present was created by the future Florence Nightingale envisioned. Everyone of us today is creating a future world with our lives.
All of us on the growing NIGH team, thank you for connecting with us here, for renewing your personal commitment and for working and watching, with us, as, together, we make the dream of a healthy world become reality for everyone.
|
