From: Meleis, A.I. (2021). Commentary on 2020 and 2021 Years of the Nurse and Midwife. Nursing School of Coimbra (Ed.) Education and Interprofessional Work in Health, (p. 11-15).
The COVID-19 Pandemic ravaged the world, causing many sorrows and much grief. It challenged health care services and health care delivery. But, it also shed an incredible light on the centrality of nurses’ roles in all aspects of the pandemic, from prevention, to diagnosis, to treatment, to healing, to managing the end of life transition. While nurses have always been at the center of health care, and in many ways have always played significant roles in health care, the global visibility and the challenges associated with the uncertainty of a new pandemic highlighted nurses’ caring and healing roles. Nurses’ knowledge, practice, voice, advocacy and caring shined.
Two other aspects of nursing practice became very apparent. One is qualitative and the other is quantitative. The severe shortage of nurses, which has been well known and much discussed, in the face of the heightened needs for expert caring in hospitals and in intensive care units, put a face on these shortages. The second highlighted aspect about nurses was the central roles they played in palliative care and in the end of life process. Due to isolation because of COVID-19 contagiousness, families could not be with patients during end of life care. But nurses were there to virtually connect their patients with families and to provide evidence-based quality care to patients during their last hours. They provided family care as well, which was virtually delivered. Telehealth acquired a different meaning and importance during this pandemic. Bravo nurses!
Policy makers saw firsthand how the shortages of nurses devastated health care delivery systems and how nurses’ expertise in family health and end of life was instrumental to provided care. What nurse leaders have always discussed and highlighted for policy makers became a tangible reality.
WHO made another unprecedented decision - to declare the continuation of the year of the nurse and midwife through 2021. Now it is imperative to take full advantage of the visibility of nurses’ roles and science in global health, as well as the declaration of WHO, to press on toward universal health policies, to insure equitable and quality health care.
Two particular areas that could benefit from the timing, the context and the touch needed for quality care are, first, nurses’ educational opportunities, and second, nurses’ leadership roles in health care policies.
Building on the platform and the goals of Nursing Now recommendations and strategic goals, which are endorsed globally, countries must provide university education for nurses that prepare them to deliver evidence-based models of care. Portugal must promptly move all educational programs for nursing to universities. Countries are expected to insure that nurses are well prepared for leadership roles and that health care policy bodies include nurses’ voices. Nurses should be expected and allowed to work up to their full capacity, and their scope of practice should be congruent with their educational levels. Nurses should be well positioned to influence health care policies globally.
I wish for my Portuguese nursing colleagues a year of leadership marked by actions, beginning with the inclusion of all nursing schools within the halls of universities as full partners and with the appointment of nurses to every policy making body in the country.
The year 2021 should be an action year for nurses who are very well positioned to use nursing knowledge in the development of the best care models and policies that will enhance the quality of care.
References
Meleis, A.I. (2021). Commentary on 2020 and 2021 Years of the Nurse and Midwife. Nursing School of Coimbra (Ed.) Education and Interprofessional Work in Health, (p. 11-15).
Nursing Now: https://www.nursingnow.org/
WHO. (2020). State of the World’s Nursing 2020: Investing in Education, Jobs and Leadership: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003279
