GAPFON is born!

HULL, United Kingdom—I have just returned from Switzerland, from the inaugural meeting of GAPFON (Global Advisory Panel on the Future of Nursing). It was a privilege to be there. Established by Hester Klopper, PhD, MBA, RN, FANSA, president of the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI), GAPFON is chaired by Martha Hill, PhD, RN, FAAN, immediate past dean and professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (USA). The meeting was attended by Patricia ‘Pat’ Thompson, EdD, RN, FAAN, chief executive officer of STTI, a glittering host of global nursing stars … and me! The full list of participants is available in this news article in Reflections on Nursing Leadership, and the work of the panel will become public through various events across the world over the next two years. I intend that the Lancet Commission on UK Nursing will work very closely with GAPFON.

GAPFON was held near Basel in the idyllic town of Mariastein, a Catholic Marian grotto owned and run by the Benedictine brothers and Franciscan sisters. Mariastein means “Maria in the stone,” in honour of reported miracles in which the Virgin Mary was said to have protected children who fell down a cliff and escaped injury. In observance of those events, a statue of the Virgin was placed in a nearby grotto.

We were accommodated in the Hotel Kurhaus Kreuz, and it was the ideal venue for a few days of peace with time to think and begin planning for the future of nursing globally. We were in the mountains, the sun shone every day, and the scenery was beautiful. Apart from the slightly thin air—my excuse for a pounding heart and heaving chest—and the frequent hills in the road, this was an ideal running spot. There was hardly any traffic on the roads, and, on my second run, I left Switzerland and ran into France for around 10 miles. It was the first time I registered two countries on my Garmin webpage on the same day.

Hotel Kurhaus Kreuz

Next week I will be in London for the Research Excellence Framework subpanel meeting, and the rest of the week I will be in Glasgow at the Royal College of Nursing of the United Kingdom International Nursing Research Conference. I look forward to hearing about the latest nursing research, meeting old friends, co-presenting on the use of social media in nursing, and launching Nursing Open.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. Comments are moderated. Those that promote products or services will not be posted.

I could almost be a nurse!

UNIVERSITY OF HULL, UK—“I’ve had so much contact with nursing over the past few years I could almost be a nurse.” This statement, or a slight variant thereof, has been uttered in my presence in each of the four universities where I have worked and in others where I have undertaken quality assurance or other external work. The protagonist is, invariably, male; a member of a university senior management team; and coincidentally, I presume, an engineer. Perhaps engineers are more adept than most at “engineering” their way into the higher echelons of university management, but I’ll have to consider that possibility another day.

Before entering nursing, I studied biochemistry at the bachelor and doctoral levels. However, I long ago gave up all pretensions about being a biochemist, not due to modesty, but lest I get “caught out” by a hard question. In the same vein, I have never heard fellow nurses, even though many have been in senior university positions and with significant exposure to other disciplines, claim that the exposure led them to consider themselves “almost a physicist,” “almost a philosopher” or “almost a mathematician.” So, what is it about nursing that leads people to say these things, and what should our response be?

My guess about why people in these positions say these things is that it is due to a subconscious—I am being generous—attitude of superiority about their chosen discipline whereby what they do is considered difficult, and nursing is considered easy. I can only guess further that their image of nurses is immobilised in stereotypes: feminine; middle class; not highly educated; and “caring.”

I would not wish to dress nursing up to be something it is not. Nursing is a practice-based discipline that lies at the crossroads of several disciplines that include life sciences, social sciences and medicine. Nursing, as a subject, may not grapple with the origins of the universe, solving the world economic crisis or designing iconic buildings. Nevertheless, we do deal with the origins of someone’s distress, finding a solution to that stress and helping rebuild people who may become iconic in their own right. And we don’t just do this once, but many times a day and hundreds of times a year.

We don’t do it alone; we work in partnership with many professions and have to know more about them than they ever seem to know about us. It may look easy but, reflecting on my own clinical practice many years ago and the kinds of problems I currently address in my research, it certainly doesn’t feel easy.

My response to statements such as the one at the top of this post used to be a polite laugh; followed by a stony face and then a grimace, with an inwardly expressed gratitude that the person found their métier elsewhere. I have, more recently, decided to return to smiling and inwardly expressing gratitude that, however easy it seems and however hard it actually is, I found my own métier.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.