Nursing is my past, present and future. After a twelve-year career as an actor, I now follow in my registered nurse mother’s footsteps, working as an early-career public health community staff nurse with newly arrived asylum seekers, some of our society’s most disadvantaged members.

I believe we must invest in tomorrow’s nursing leaders because we are the future and beating heart of our profession, requiring courtesy and kindness yet boldness and insistence. While we welcome experienced mentorship, we can provide reverse-mentoring through partnership-working, bringing fresh perspectives to creative problem solving for the many issues faced in healthcare.

Additionally, as future leaders, we can provide peer support, learning from international best practice. As nurses, we are one of the only healthcare professions there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, allowing us to intimately and holistically know those we serve on individual and population levels. Therefore, we can advocate in a way no other profession can, making us prime drivers for change. This change must be individualised, person-centred and co-produced with communities, involving empowerment, role-modelling, training projects and public health education and promotion, enabling disease prevention.

All United Nations (U.N., 2015) Member States committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals, uniting them in global partnership to address global health issues. As future leaders, we have the capabilities, power and tools to be authentic and effective agents for social change. We can propel forwards the agendas of addressing global health injustice, eradicating global health inequalities, and achieving universal health coverage for all.

Coming from a high-income country, I am acutely aware we have much to learn from lower and middle-income countries, from the innovative and revolutionary initiatives they have implemented, as the State of the World’s Nursing Report highlights (World Health Organization (WHO), 2020). However, we are also ethically obliged to help others as a resource-rich nation (Campbell, Pleic and Connelly, 2012). Global working requires future nurse leaders to be inclusive and inclusively literate, pertinent as nursing education, fields and specialities vary significantly internationally.

Covid-19 exposed that healthcare systems, locally, nationally and globally, were unprepared. And while individual nurses require the ability to recover from difficult situations, anecdotal evidence suggests a co-opting of the terminology “resilience”. We often see the term resilience used as a weapon against individual nurses, diverting from systematic failings, causing individuals to experience internalised guilt, feelings of inadequacy, and I am confident sometimes preventing disclosure. It is victim-blaming and potentially gaslighting. If individuals cannot bounce back, there can be the perception they are not strong enough to be nurses. Attitudes must change. Because when the adrenaline of managing the pandemic wears off, systems will question individual nurse’s resilience if they struggle with potential physical, emotional and psychological fallout and trauma.

Instead, future nurse leaders need to help cultivate and develop emotionally intelligent, reflective practitioners who advocate for healthcare systems that operate likewise. Additionally, we must become more proactive and less reactive as a profession, demanding protected time for continuing professional development and restorative clinical supervision. Our future nursing leaders must fight to enhance our professional status. We need more nurse specialists, researchers and further investment in advanced nursing services. Most importantly, we need to see ourselves as leaders. If we do not, how can we expect other healthcare professionals to see us this way? We must use the lived and empirical evidence we have accrued as nurses to exhibit these leadership capabilities while working collaboratively with our interprofessional colleagues to achieve global health goals.

I hope by focussing on these suggestions, we encourage all nursing professionals to develop and flourish, addressing the four pillars of clinical practice, leadership and management, education, and research. To do so, we need to enable, empower and educate our early-career nurses and students to harness each of these. Too often, we tell these individuals only to focus on clinical practice, or they have little knowledge of the other pillars and how to develop their careers accordingly. This thinking is detrimental to our profession, as we should celebrate nursing in all its multi-faceted glory.

I believe, to achieve this goal, much has to change. We must be cognisant of “toxic positivity” because perceived “negativity” is often essential to drive change when backed by evidence. Future nursing leaders have the power to do this. They must be campaigners and lobbyists who can intelligently influence on local, national and global stages. Governments, policymakers, non-governmental organisations and national and international nursing associations need to acknowledge and invest in the benefit of these opportunities for our profession. And we do this by illustrating how these changes will improve the population health of the communities we all serve. Our leaders must be present and heard in government to effect change.

Covid-19 has illustrated how reactive the nursing profession can be, but we need to invest in our workforce and education proactively. We already know retention of new registrants within their first two years is a significant issue, and pre-pandemic, we had global staffing shortages of nine million individuals (WHO, 2020). However, I worry this pandemic will exacerbate this, prompting a mass exodus of new registrants and near-retirement nurses unless we address potential emotional and psychological burnout.

Additionally, despite nurses and midwives making up fifty per cent of the healthcare workforce, our education receives only a quarter of the expenditure on healthcare education (WHO, 2020). Therefore, we must address safe staffing legislation and better pay, terms and conditions for our profession. Without the infrastructure to secure enough staff to support students, how can we encourage and nurture them to become future leaders? We have to inspire our future nursing leaders at all stages of their careers. Again, this requires us to be campaigners and lobbyists. We reach hearts by sharing the stories of those we care for as natural empaths. Then, we back this up with evidence regarding the human and health economic cost.

Craig Davidson RN

https://twitter.com/CraigDavidson85

REFERENCES

CAMPBELL, R.M., PLEIC, M. & CONNOLLY, H., 2012. The importance of a common global health definition: How Canada’s definition influences its strategic direction in global health. Journal of Global Health [online]. 2(1), pp. 1-6. [viewed 18 April 2021]. Available from: DOI: 10.7189/jogh.02.010301

UNITED NATIONS, 2015a. Sustainable Development Goals [online]. United Nations. [viewed 18 April 2021]. Available from: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, 2020. State of the World’s Nursing Report – 2020 [online]. World Health Organization. [viewed 18 April 2021]. Available from: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/nursing-report-2020