If Not You, Then Who?
As we head into 2012, the Human Capital Blog asked Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) staff, program directors, scholars and grantees to share their New Year’s resolutions for our health care system, and what they think should be the priorities for action in the New Year. This post is by Nancy E. Donaldson, RN, DNSc, FAAN, is a clinical professor and director, University of California San Francisco Center for Evidence-Based Quality Improvement, a JBI Affiliate Centre, and an investigator for RWJF’s Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative.
As health care professionals, nurses are privileged and empowered by a unique proximity to patients and families. We share the first breath of newborns and the last breaths of all those beloved people at the end of life; we see patients and families in clinics, homes, extended care, correctional, community, and acute care settings. In the midst of unprecedented technological innovation, we still honor and practice the fundamentals of care by bringing comfort, cleanliness, safety, nutrition, dignity and caring to persons and families whose values, preferences and health traditions vary widely.
It is difficult and rewarding work, perhaps a calling. As we embark on a new year, more than ever before we are truly called to lead and fully engage in transforming the American health care system. If not now, then when? If not us, then who?
We—you and me, our families and the community of all Americans— deserves the best health care to maximize health and healing and to optimize the lived experience and contributions to benefit society.
We don’t have that level of health care yet, or only a few of us do because we have the funds, mobility and sophistication to seek it out and demand it. We all have stories of friends, loved ones, or strangers whose lives are cut short or changed forever by lack of access to evidence-based, affordable, quality health care.
The most important priority facing us is to achieve the aims of the Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report and to fulfill our destiny as leaders and fully engaged participants in transforming health care. Thousands and thousands of lives depend on us!
What is YOUR personal plan of action? How will YOU step up to the implementation of the Future of Nursing recommendations? How can you use your gifts as a clinician, a leader, an advocate to advance it? If not you, then who?
Imagine what we can accomplish if we all do a little and share the same vision for our profession and for the reformed American health care system!
