Call for health as a public issue

Extract from the publication Florence Nightingale Today: 

“As nurses, we demonstrate that healing must be addressed with a significant caring component.  As nurses, we attend to healing by understanding that recovery and health are impacted by the environments we create — physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale. Click for large photo

As nurses, we address about the problems of human distress, injury, and disease. However, we also know that healing requires the conscious promotion of health-supporting factors — such as comfort and rest, relief of pain, adequate fluids and nutrition, clean air, use of sunshine and light, exercise, applied knowledge of health processes, and emotional and spiritual support.

We know that these positive health determinants — when they are provided — become, in and of themselves, significant solutions to the problems of disease. As nurses, we know that communication and education are essential approaches to promoting healing and recovery and to sustaining health.

Our voices are highly trusted (Ananova, 2002) because we have won and sustained that trust by effectively caring for people’s health for a long, long time. Now, we can move beyond our bedside arenas to administrative, financial, legislative and health regulatory arenas — to apply our  trusted voices to calling for health as a public issue, a political issue, a voter-priority.  

Knowledge is power and we have critical knowledge to take the lead in our efforts for global citizenship. For instance, because of our caring expertise, we can make a significant contribution to the growth of a worldwide civil society of committed, caring, and compassionate citizens.  We can share our able hands and our pertinent voices with already-established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are working on health issues.

We can also form our own innovative NGO communities. We are good at facilitating teams of people to accomplish healthcare objectives. We can cross-transfer these skills — from hospitals and clinics — to town-meetings, regional conferences and even to global summits. We are excellent collaborators. We can collaborate with other disciplines — such as those who are working on environmental clean-up, human rights and social justice — to bring our relevant health promotion mandate to these teams. We can work, as many are already doing, by thinking global and acting local. We can establish local "best practices" to promote health and then — through the use of media and related internet communications — share the results of our outcomes so that our successes can be further replicated on a global scale  

Global Visioning

Like Nightingale has done before us, we must continue to focus on the value of excellent caring in all aspects of "sick-nursing." At the same time, we can also broaden our scopes beyond the limited practice of "sick-nursing" to understand and practice "health-nursing." As "health-nurses" we can see the value of identifying and implementing positive health determinants.  That same list discussed earlier — "comfort and rest, relief of pain, adequate fluids and nutrition, clean air, use of sunshine and light, exercise, applied knowledge of health processes, and emotional and spiritual support" — can be brought, not only to our traditional practice areas and individual patients, but also to regional and global arenas and the whole of humanity.

The practice of "health-nursing" requires a broader pro-active perspective — a global vision that points to the value of bringing, financing, and maintaining positive health determinants to people — at local, regional and global levels. As nurses, we have always held a vision for healing and for health.  Global visioning is simply the widening our lenses and our scopes — to communicate what we know to the public, to share the value of our perspectives and the effectiveness of our practices — with our wider world.  

The health problems of today require renewed vision and applied participation of committed concerned citizens who take an active role in the promotion — locally through to globally — of human health. In Nightingale’s footsteps, we can recall that we — as nurses — have a significant breadth and depth of knowledge and skill to significantly share in these endeavors. We know about healing. For centuries, healing has been our natural arena. We have been excellent healers. Great improvements in human health have come from service within our ranks. Now, as the 21st century progresses, we can tap that knowledge more effectively by also becoming excellent leaders — at all levels of need — in our advocacy for human health.

Thus, with Nightingale’s blueprint, we can also be effective global visionaries. We can focus our collective "callings" for the sake of 21st century health care and related health social, ecological, and human rights issues. We can continue the practices we have established. We can also be innovative and create new practice arenas. We can model the fulfillment and satisfaction of being nurses — of bringing health and healing to our world. Nightingale held the vision for us — to remember who we are, what we can do, who we care for and why.”