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Your Excellencies, Distinguished
Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It
gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the Second International
Jordanian Nursing Council Conference.
This event is significant for JNC as
it hosts a convention of great minds and opens the dialogue on pressing
health and nursing issues. This convention embraces a vital agenda of
national and global concerns.
I am pleased to learn that over 23
nations, are represented here today; An indication of your awareness of
the need to work together as one entity ,to meet the challenges of
globalization, the demands of open exchange and free mobility, and the
need for global nursing perspective.
Your
presence here is a commitment to making the world a better place, to
develop nursing as a relevant and responsive discipline, to bring
coherence to its meaning and articulate its essence, and to envision the
future direction for nursing.
Nursing made great strides over the
past decades. It developed its body of knowledge and its theoretical
basis to support the profession's status, its practice, research and
education. It established its status as a respected profession, and
developed its education to prepare nurses for all levels of
responsibilities from direct service to leadership and policy making.
Despite advancement to its current
standing, Nursing faces many challenges: Nursing is often criticized
for not clearly articulating what it uniquely brings to the table to
inform health systems and health reform. As a practice discipline, it
does not coherently inform the strategies for nursing practice, and
nursing action, especially in the face of the new demands of rapidly
changing environment, technology, and health determinants.
Nursing theory-practice gap -which
has been long recognized- continues to await the promised bridge; the
structure of which has been devised, yet, not efficiently constructed
and not widely implemented. The gap ensued between practice and theory,
as nurses shifted their focus on building the body of knowledge without
a parallel focus on practice development. Nursing knowledge was not
always central, nor relevant to practice. It was not translated for
implementation as often as it should, nor was it disseminated
effectively.
Theory- practice gap, yet posed
another challenge; it created an intellectual and social division
between the intellectual elite and the direct care nurse. Nursing
ethos of caring and concern for others were broken within nursing and
among nurses.
Nursing
elite blamed direct care provider nurses for not meeting their
expectations, and demanded, autonomous, accountable and quality patient
care. Nurses in the workplace, in return, rejected the arrogance of the
nursing elite who live in" Ivory Towers", and theorize without
understanding the reality of humanness of health conditions.
In moving the focus away from
practice, nursing ran the risk of losing its "raison d'ętre".
Justifiable as it is, intellectual pursuit in nursing and its level of
abstraction diverted, at times, the focus from its ultimate goal of
caring and attending to humanness in health circumstances.
Nurse scholars were taken by the lure
and the prestige of scholarship and were drawn to what challenged their
intellectualism, and in the process, some imperceptibly, lost their
focus on the calling.
Nursing
practice significance rests on nursing ultimate goal. Nursing
scholarship cannot serve but nursing and its ultimate goal; otherwise it
is "something else" scholarship.
Nursing education has as its main aim, the preparation of nurses for
their role as care agents. Education of nurses has the responsibility
to prepare nurses who understand and value the meaning of caring, those
who will practice with compassion and respect for the worth and
uniqueness of every individual in every encounter, nurses who believe in
their own significance and that of their healing abilities .
Every day nursing is what counts to
consumers of nursing. Nursing as a practice profession gains its respect
and status from its ability to engage and deliver to individuals, to
communities, and to the health systems.
To remain socially relevant and
indispensable, nursing might need to move beyond institutional health
care and move towards improving social circumstances and devise care
that targets broader determinants of health.
The changing environment for health
services, and the current organizational power structures, introduces
new urgent matters for nursing and its leadership. In this era of
regulation and imbalanced power in health institutions, nurses are often
seen as the employees and resources of care, rather than service
providers of health care.
Nursing in acute settings, in today's
multidisciplinary approach and case mix models of care, is being
threatened to lose areas of its main territory, and aspects of its
autonomy and scope of work.
Nurses
must be on full alert of the power struggles, to preserve their role,
and their position in the health care system. They need to protect their
status, which they can not afford to lose, after many years of hard work
and deliberation. Nurses need to be aware of the power of politics, and
position themselves where they have a say in the matter, and where they
make, and shape decisions.
Nurses traditionally advocate for their patients and their well being,
they advocate for marginalized and under-served patients. They need to
be empowered to amplify their abilities to fend further for their
patients and for themselves.
Yet another challenge for nursing is
to meet the demands of globalization; economic restraints, quality
control, universal standards, open markets, free trade of goods and
services, human resource, nurse workforce shortage, immigration and
mobility, ethical aspects of freedom equality and social justice, and
fair health care distribution.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Our values and assumptions, direct our
knowledge pursuit, our research agendas, and our decisions. This is the
time to re-examine our knowledge base and its assumptions. Global
living taught us that truth and knowledge are never absolute. It
informed us that reality in not one, and that diversity means
multiplicity of world views.
Theories that explain health
circumstances and human experiences in one society are not necessarily
relevant to other societies, cultures and experiences.
Nurses at all times, seek to
understand. Recognition of the limitations of knowledge developed in one
corner of the earth to explain global health phenomena is invaluable.
Context, time and space change
perspective which means, that - if they have not done so yet - nurses
need to re-examine the taken-for-granted truths, to abandon dogma and
bias, to embrace a world of many realities, to trust in their inner
calling for understanding.
Nursing is in critical need to seek
forums for debate and for developing a true global perspective that best
understands and informs strategies that are worthy of addressing the
realities of human health conditions in the global world.
This is the time for nurses to ascertain who they want to be, to
cohesively tell the world what they are about, what they can do, to
reclaim their territory, to reflect collectively and individually on how
they make a difference.
This
is the time to revisit old ways, and old days, to color these with new
insights, experiences and better understanding. It is time now, to
travel down old roads and explore less traveled ones–to reflect on
privileged moments when they were invited into their patients' homes',
their world, and their lives, to share their pains, anxieties and dark
moments; on opportunities to extend themselves to instill hope, and
relieve pain, precious, unparalleled instances treasured by them and
their patients alike.
I am confident that this conference
will do all of this, and reward your sincere hard work with the
excitement of revelation of new realities, of the promise for visions
and possibilities for the future.
May God bless all your efforts.
Thank you. |
