Microsoft Word - Dunkin_column


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Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care, vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 2010 

Editorial 
 

NURSING AND HEALTH CARE 
 

By Jeri W. Dunkin, PhD, RN, FAAN 
Editor 

 
 
I want to focus my editorial for this issue on the role I believe nurses should take in the 

development, implementation and refinement of health care systems at the local, state, national 
and international level. This was reaffirmed for me with the release of the Institute of Medicine 
(IOM) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation landmark report, “The Future of Nursing: 
Leading Change, Advancing Health” on October 5, 2010.  In that report nurses are cited as a 
catalyst for the transformation of health care system, ensuring that care is patient-centered, 
effective, safe and affordable. While this report provides a blueprint for improving health care in 
the United States, which calls for the remodeling of a health care system to ensure high-quality, 
patient-centered care through the leadership of nurses, the messages it carries are applicable to 
nursing and health care around the world.   

The culmination of a rigorous and consequential two-year initiative, the report outlines 
four overarching messages directed toward policymakers, national, state and local government 
leaders, payers, and health care researchers, executives, and health care professionals. These 
messages, I believe transcend geographic boundaries and encompass all nurses- from those in the 
most populous to the most sparsely populated areas of every country, and furthermore, rural 
nurses everywhere share the historical experience of collaboration and cooperative practices 
needed to achieve high quality health care for their patients and communities.  The four key 
messages include: 

 
• Nurses should practice to the full extent of their education and training;  
• Nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an 

improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression;  
• Nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other health care 

professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States; and  
• Effective workforce planning and policy making require better data collection and 

an improved information infrastructure.  
 
The report acknowledges that to achieve significant improvements to local, state and 

national health policy, the largest segment of the health care workforce – nurses – need to be 
fully engaged with other health professions, and I believe that this nursing leadership and 
collaboration should, no must, be centric to health care programming around the world.  I believe 
that now more than ever rural nurses must step forward and share their experiential knowledge of 
collaboration and cooperation with other health professionals that will provide other nurses with 
the “models that work” to move the health care systems of the world to be effective, efficient, 
affordable in providing high quality health care. 



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Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care, vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 2010 

I have included the links to the full report and the overview of the report for more details. 
To view the report visit: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12956 and to view Institute 
of Medicine overview visit: http://tinyurl.com/2bpzer2.