Nursing Our Way to Better Health

Nurses have always been on the front lines of health care provision. Increasingly, they are on the front lines of health care reform. Almost all of the ideas put forward for US health care reform, from reducing treatment costs to improving patient safety to moving care into the community, involve a significant role for nurses.

There are real questions, however, about whether the economics will support the needed nursing care. Done right, nursing can be the lynchpin for a better, cheaper health system. But if we make the same mistakes with nurses as we did with physicians, we will have wasted another shot at health care improvement.

The full article can be downloaded below.