Investing in Nurses! Leadership & Care Transformation
Despite broad awareness and agreement on the need for massive and urgent investment in nursing to transform our complex health and care systems, the American Nurses Foundation’s Philanthropic Support for the Nursing Profession report revealed that nursing receives just one penny of every healthcare philanthropy dollar. In this third and final episode in our series of rare, in-depth unscripted conversations with philanthropists, fundraisers, program managers, executive directors, grantees, and innovators we explore the creative, strategic, and evidence-based approaches to investing and fostering nurses as drivers of transformative, systemic change in health systems.
In conversations with Marion Leary, PhD, MPH, RN, Director of Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing, Howard Reid, Johnson & Johnson Global Head of Global Health Equity, and Ahrin Mishan Executive Director of The Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, we hear the connection between nurses as catalysts in care delivery transformation and investments in leadership programming and the concern that without addressing the current and significant workplace stresses, the attrition of well trained, skilled nurses from the profession will continue.
Through strategic, targeted, and enduring investments that evolve alongside changing workforce needs, programs like the Hillman Foundation’s nurse innovation grants, Design Thinking for Health, Johnson & Johnson’s Nursing Innovation Fellowship, and NurseHack4Health demonstrate their powerful impact on career growth, longevity, and preparing nurses in taking on leadership roles within their institutions, in the broader health care sector, and at all levels of public policy. These thought leaders encourage more funders to look at nursing as an investment in accelerating the improvement of our healthcare systems and make clear that nurses are best positioned to identify, implement, and disseminate innovative strategies to advance health care access, quality and equity.
