Professional nursing has long been recognized as the heart and hands of the healthcare delivery system. Highly rated by the public as trusted and ethical, the struggles of the profession in regard to describing the actual work of nurses remain.
 
With knowledge based in sciences, working from an evidence-based perspective, nurses are found in many parts of society where they provide lifesaving treatments to those in need, teach in universities, serve as researchers finding new cures, in board rooms as healthcare executives, and in the halls of government designing new systems of care. A vastly complex and robust profession, nurse leaders portray this richness in the documentary Nurses: If Florence Could See Us Now (available at www.nursesthemovie.com).
 
Much is changing as the profession is at last embracing the need for expanded education and preparing for the future generations of nurses to lead and to provide advanced care in new delivery systems that are emerging.
 
In 2011, the national work of the Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing (available at www.iom.edu/Reports/2010/The-Future-of-Nursing-Leading-Change-Advancing-Health.aspx) made clear the priorities for the profession. Summarized in eight straightforward recommendations, the report provides the roadmap for healthcare organizations, education institutions, the public and nurses themselves. Those eight recommendations are:
1. Remove scope-of-practice barriers. Advanced practice registered nurses should be able to practice to the full extent of their education and training.
2. Expand opportunities for nurses to lead and diffuse collaborative improvement efforts.
3. Implement nurse residency programs.
4. Increase the proportion of nurses with a baccalaureate degree to 80 percent by 2020.
5. Double the number of nurses with a doctorate by 2020.
6. Ensure that nurses engage in lifelong learning.
7. Prepare and enable nurses to lead change to advance health. Nurses, nursing education programs, and nursing associations should prepare the nursing workforce to assume leadership positions across all levels, while public, private, and governmental healthcare decision makers should ensure that leadership positions are available to and filled by nurses.
8. Build an infrastructure for the collection and analysis of interprofessional healthcare workforce data.
 
These actions must progress in rapid fashion for nursing to be transformed and be prepared to meet today’s and tomorrow’s healthcare needs, and to make the contributions to system redesign that nurses are very capable of accomplishing.