UNIVERSITY of Technology Sydney Emeritus Professor Jill White has redefined the word ‘nurse’ and ‘nursing’ to include all aspects of the profession, including primary healthcare, policy advocacy, and climate change mitigation.
In an interview with the media at the Holiday Inn yesterday, she said that she had worked with the International Council of Nurses to redefine nursing “so that we capture all of the essence of nursing for the next generations”.
“One of the reasons that we came up with something that wasn’t just an elevator pitch, or a quick, snappy definition was that we wanted to make sure that it represented the totality of the work of nurses that it represented,” Ms White said.
“It looks at our role on a one-on-one basis, with patients, with families in the community.
“It speaks also to our role in policy, and it certainly speaks to our role in making sure that there’s a safe and sustainable environment for the future.”
She said climate change affects many aspects of nursing, and this needed to be recognised and acknowledged.
“We’ve got just crazy climate things happening in many, many places, and the intensity of that is only going to increase the sea level, increasing the temperature of the sea.
“Increasing all of these play a role in people’s health, the ability to get good food, the ability to fish in the oceans, the ability to grow certain crops, the ability to withstand increased heat, and the consequences of that, particularly for elderly people in the community.
“So, nurses have to have a role in all of this, because it’s about keeping people healthy and making sure that they have good and sustainable food, fluid, clean water.”
Ms White said that nurses are not just about looking after people when they’re ill but also preventing people from getting ill.
The new definition of ‘nurse’ and ‘nursing’ are quite long but could be found on https://www.icn.ch/resources/nursing-definitions/current-nursing-definitions.