Curt Selquist, on The Campaign for Nursing's Future

By Bree LeMaire, MS, RN
January 10, 2003

What has been your role in this campaign to reduce the nursing shortage?

There have been many people involved in this campaign. I sit on the boards of a few nursing organizations and that was where I first became aware of the critical nature of the shortage. The coverage was mostly in professional articles, not in the lay press. I brought the concept to Johnson & Johnson to explore what we could do. We knew we couldn't resolve the problem, but we certainly had some well-tried expertise to offer.

Why did Johnson & Johnson decide to embark on such a campaign?

Johnson & Johnson has a credo that essentially says that things that affect our customers affect us. The nursing shortage was certainly affecting our customers and we wanted to do what we could.

At first, we weren't certain just where we could help, but knew we could at the least bring our skills of communication and consumer education to the mix.

We started the process in the late summer of 2001 and hired outside firms to create the research, do focus groups and devise a campaign. We wanted to know the depth of the shortage, understand why it was happening and create messages that would reach potential nursing school candidates.

In our research, we found that two out of three Americans were worried about the quality of health care. We read news articles where ambulance crews were being diverted and hospital beds were empty because of the lack of nurse staffing. We talked with working RNs and those who still considered themselves nurses, but were working with allied organizations. We also talked with professional nursing organizations to try to understand the obstacles they were facing in recruiting more potential candidates.

Our first presentation of The Campaign for Nursing's Future was in Washington, D.C., in February, where we launched our recruiting campaign. We presented the nurses in our commercials and showed those commercials for the first time. We expected around 200 people and ended up with more than 1,000. Then, to our surprise, Johnson & Johnson also aired the spots from Salt Lake City to begin the Winter Olympics.

Another part of our campaign is providing scholarships, which we fund from the proceeds of the Promise of Nursing events in cities with the most severe nursing shortages. We have underwritten these events to celebrate nursing, recognizing patients who are particularly happy with their nurses and the hospitals where it all takes place. We encourage local participation in these events and all the money raised is donated for scholarships in that area.

We had our first banquet in San Francisco, then moved on to Dallas, Chicago, Miami and Detroit. Next year, we will target about seven new cities, beginning in January with Boston. We find in doing these events that many times the hospitals had never worked with one another in the same city in this way.

To date, we've raised $2.5 million.

What would Johnson & Johnson like to achieve from this campaign?

Johnson & Johnson's credo states, "Our first opportunity is to the doctors, nurses and patients, the mothers and fathers and all those who use our products and services."

This doctrine has driven our way of thinking for the past 60 years. We fully think that if there's a problem in the world, it's our obligation to do what we can. It's how we behave in the world that we work in. We do not do this to sell additional goods.

Where are you in the campaign now?

Johnson & Johnson views this as a multiyear campaign.
First, we wanted to help raise the awareness and image of the profession by using recruiting materials such as posters and brochures that were gender-neutral and diverse in every aspect. Those recruiting materials were mailed to more than 20,000 high schools and every nursing school and hospital in the United States. The response has been phenomenal.

We also created a Web site, discovernursing.com, which we keep current. It is run on a state-by-state basis with lists of nursing schools, what an entering nursing student would need, as well as scholarships and available grants.

Contact Bree LeMaire at peraltap@aol.com