NurseWeek News

Future Looks Bright
Taking a cue from nursing's past will lead profession into the 21st century

By Beth Ulrich, Ed.D., RN, South Central Editor
July 8, 2002

Some people wonder why we look back at the past, but without it, there is no today. And without today, there is no future. For our nursing history, we tend to look back to its beginnings with Florence Nightingale, although nursing can be traced to biblical times as an act of commitment if not as a profession. But it was Nightingale who led us into seeing nursing as a profession that required specific education and, as with other professions, in need of constant self-improvement.

She once said, "For us who nurse, our nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it, we are going back." Going back was never on her agenda and she led the movement to take nursing forward. She had many of the same problems that we face today: too few staff, too many patients, doctors who thought she was trying to take over their jobs, too few resources, too little pay, hours that were long and people who thought the way it was done in the past was how it always should be. Linda Richards (1841-1930), the first trained nurse in America, not only improved nursing in the United States, but in other countries as well.

Throughout the 20th century, nursing has continued to make progress, yet all the while having to work over, under and around many of the same problems. And what of tomorrow? In my participation with the American Nephrology Nurses' Association (I once had the honor of being its president and now have the honor of being editor of its journal), I recently had the chance to get to know a young nurse who wasn't even born when I started my nursing career. She inspired me and filled me with hope for our future. A family nurse practitioner of two years, she sees nursing as it will be.

I have found the same spirit in the new graduate nurses that I have the privilege to work with in NURSEWEEK's Nursing Odyssey project, in which we follow new graduates in their first year in the field. This generation of nurses, the first of the 21st century-using energy, hope and determination-will build the nursing profession of tomorrow. Because of young nurses like these, I remain confident in the success of our profession.

Our continued success can be attributed to a foundation built on a solid set of values. Nurses care about people. Richards, in describing the future of nursing, once said, "Fifty years from now, nurses will look back and say that we did not know very much about nursing in the first decade of the 20th century, even with the 25 years of pioneer work that lay behind us. Nevertheless, the more faithfully each of us does her own individual work of today, the more rapid will be the growth of this great movement, the art of caring for the sick, which has already exercised so vast an influence in all countries on the social conditions of the state and of the city and of the town, and on the social customs of the family and the neighborhood."

If you were to change "20th" to "21st" century, the same could be said today.

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