Forty nurses -- and many more in the profession -- squeezed into the Lee and Bob Cress Board Room inside the main administrative building at Arkansas Children's Hospital on June 5. Squeezed? Oh, the room's huge, but any crowd must share real estate with one of the city's roundest conference tables (we hear it seats 35).
It was the inaugural 40 Nurse Leaders Under 40 ceremony hosted by the Arkansas Action Coalition. These 40 came from around the state at the behest of nominators (the final group was ultimately picked by a committee of nursing leaders).
The coalition is a member of the national Center to Champion Nursing in America (an initiative of AARP, the AARP Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), which formed in the shadow of a hugely influential report on nursing from the Institute of Medicine that came out in 2010 -- "The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health."
"It's nice to be around the young leaders because we're so often around the old leaders," Sue Tedford, executive director of the state Board of Nursing, told the gathering. It will be rewarding "watching your career [as you] make so many footprints in nursing."
One of the pillars of the Arkansas effort is education, says Debra Jeffs, Children's Hospital's director of nursing education: just over half of all nurses in America have bachelor's degrees (one needs only an associate degree to be a registered nurse); and in Arkansas, that number is 38 percent.
Tedford moved the assembled to think of nursing not just as medical and interpersonal but cultural, almost political -- "We [nurses] are the largest health care profession, and if we get out there and we voice what we think, they will listen. We have strength in numbers. Let's get out there and let them know what's going on."
High Profile on 06/21/2015