When I reflect on the theme for World Health Day 2020, I realise how far nurses and midwives have come in the past 50 years. In our book ‘The Road to Nursing’, we focus on developing nurses’ professional roles and nursing as a lifelong career. Nursing and midwifery professionals are privileged to share the most intimate moments of people’s life journeys, bearing witness and bringing comfort at the happiest and saddest of times.

Nurses and midwives bring their knowledge, skills, expertise, clinical judgement and humanity to their work, they promote health, provide education, care for the ill, support those giving birth and people at the end of their life.

It is interesting that in Chapter 7 (p.110), of The Road to Nursing, the role of nurses as change agents is discussed: ‘The scope of practice for nurses has changed in today’s highly technological healthcare environment’. The discussion goes on to talk about professional nurses of today being highly educated and having advanced scopes of practice to take on more healthcare leading roles. This is particularly pertinent at the moment with the global spread of a new virus that requires skilled and compassionate responses to contain and treat infectious disease.

So, while nurses have always been vital to healthcare globally, they are even more essential now, in the efforts to meet the health needs of people in the midst of the outbreak of a new virus.

I encourage everyone whose life has been touched by the professional care of nurses to strongly support and acknowledge the key role that nurses play in the design and delivery of healthcare services. I ask people to lobby for greater recognition of the valuable role nurses play in supporting people in sickness and health. Nurses’ voices should be more evident in the media and in the policy-making space, as they are best placed to advocate for the needs of healthcare consumers, because they are a constant presence, through good times and bad.

The Road to Nursing provides a friendly guiding voice that will support students from the classroom into practice. The book is edited by Nick Arnott, Penny Paliadelis, and Mary Cruickshank. Click here for more information.