It’s not easy to improve healthcare and outcomes for patients and families. But as nurses, our knowledge, resiliency, and experience on the front lines of providing care position us well to evaluate what is working, what isn’t, and to make the changes needed to achieve this goal.
As we tackle transforming healthcare, we also need to transform nursing. The recent Institute of Medicine report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health and its “blueprint for action” is a powerful guide. The eight recommendations listed within the blueprint break down what must be done to help us improve how we lead, educate, practice, build infrastructures, and partner with other healthcare professionals.
In this issue and the upcoming two issues of Johns Hopkins Nursing magazine, we will look internally and externally–calling upon our faculty, students, alumni, staff, fellow nurses, partners, and friends–and show how nursing is implementing the recommendations and working toward transforming our profession.
To start, I reached out to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation senior advisor for nursing, Susan Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, and asked what she views as nursing’s top priorities. Read her thoughts on education, leadership, and collaboration.
Martha N. Hill, PhD, RN, FAAN, ‘64
Dean
Professor and Nursing, Medicine and Public Health
Editor’s note: The eight recommendations from the IOM’s Future of Nursing report are listed below. Look for these icons throughout the magazine to see how Hopkins Nursing is addressing the recommendations.
IOM Future of Nursing Recommendations
Recommendation 1: Remove scope-of-practice barriers. Recommendation 2: Expand opportunities for nurses to lead and diffuse collaborative improvement efforts. Recommendation 3: Implement nurse residency programs. Recommendation 4: Increase the proportion of nurses with a baccalaureate degree to 80 percent by 2020. Recommendation 5: Double the number of nurses with a doctorate by 2020. Recommendation 6: Ensure that nurses engage in lifelong learning. Recommendation 7: Prepare and enable nurses to lead change to advance health. Recommendation 8: Build an infrastructure for the collection and analysis of interprofessional healthcare workforce data.
