Curriculum Development
General Goals:
Learn how to argue, use data, research, facts, pre-determined policies, rules, laws
Learn how to advocate for patients, for better media, for a seat at the table
Learn how to educate the world
Learn how to analyze media
Learn how to explain your work (physicians following you, nursing out loud, bedside shift reports, K-12 students, prospective nursing students and their parents, guidance counselors, patients, families)
Learn how to create media (avoid the word nurse until later to prevent the light-switch from going off)
Strengthen deliver. Explain autonomy and advocate for it (hospital structures, protecting it with an ethics committee), to Congress, to insurance companies to get independent reimbursement
Based on myriad nurses who contact us about situations at their workplaces (please see this articulate description of the challenges today's nurses face that was posted on the Truth's Facebook page), most health institutions today disregard the opinions of nurses. RNs are replaced by health technicians, who are assigned to perform nursing care even though they have not been educated as nurses. Patients deserve better. They deserve for nurses to deliver nursing care. If decision makers understood that nurses are autonomous professionals with their own sphere of expertise, whose assessments and decision-making are the difference between life and death, nurses would be adequately staffed. The only assistants they would have would fetch things and do clerical work (as is the case at groundbreaking Hahnemann Hospital) and they would be heavily consulted in any decision-making. In fact, nurses would be the vast majority of decision makers at health institutions and in any government body or insurer agency. From the patient's perspective, a stronger nursing profession would lead to the better health care for them because nurses would be able to provide the full range of nursing care and embrace autonomy completely. Changing health care begins with changing the ideas that decision-makers currently hold. If they understood the value of nursing, they would seek greater nursing input and fund nursing practice, education, research and residencies in line with their worth, instead of the paltry investment that goes into nursing today.
We are seeking funding to pursue work on the following projects:
The Truth About Nursing Project
The Expanded Truth About Nursing Project
Educate the world that nurses save lives!
