Globally, nurses provide over 80 percent of all health care—antenatal to occupational services to end-of-life. They are essential, yet too often unheard when it comes to setting the policies they will work under in meeting public health goals like Healthy People 2030 (World Health Organization) and the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations). And policy content has not been adopted consistently across schools of nursing to put more policy-minded nurses in the pipeline.
In “Building Nurse Leaders: Integrating Policy into Nursing Education” (Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, June 2025), Fernando Mena-Carrasco and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing colleagues Natalia Barolín, Caitlin Pollard, Anne Batchelder, Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, and Sarah Szanton report on the progress of a policy mentorship program created to equip pre-licensure, Master’s (Entry into Nursing) students with foundational policy skills through a two-semester extracurricular enrichment program:
“This two-semester program exposes students to the role of nurses in policy and helps develop the skills to identify opportunities for policy change, communicate with policymakers and other power brokers (i.e., organizers, lobbyist, or professional organizations), and advocate for change. Most importantly, the program produces graduates who recognize their power as agents of change and are prepared to harness it.”
The program offers a road map “so that other nursing schools can adopt components or design similar programs to help students hone the critical competencies.”