Abstract
The 13 million nurses worldwide constitute most of the global healthcare workforce and are uniquely positioned to engage with others to address disparities in healthcare to achieve the goal of better health for all. A new vision for nurses involves active participation and collaboration with international colleagues across research practice and policy domains. Nursing can embrace new concepts and a new approach—“One World, One Health”—to animate nursing engagement in global health, as it is uniquely positioned to participate in novel ways to improve healthcare for the well-being of the global community. This opinion paper takes a historical and reflective approach to inform and inspire nurses to engage in global health practice, research, and policy to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It can be argued that a colonial perspective currently informs scholarship pertaining to nursing global health engagement. The notion of unidirectional relationships where those with resources support training of those less fortunate has dominated the framing of nursing involvement in low- and middle-income countries. This paper suggests moving beyond this conceptualization to a more collaborative and equitable approach that positions nurses as cocreators and brokers of knowledge. We propose two concepts, reverse innovation and two-way learning, to guide global partnerships where nurses are active participants.
Highlights
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established during the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, marked a pledge by 189 nations to foster international relations with shared values of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility [1]
We urge the nursing community to embrace a new ideology that is not based on or concerned with distinctions—north and south, low- and middle-income countries and highincome countries, and developing and developed countries— but is rather concerned with One World, One Health. This opinion paper explains the concept One World, One Health and takes a historical and reflective approach that invites consideration of concepts that can inform the way nursing responds to the challenges in global health engagement
We examine terms such as capacity building and explicate how they have been reframed and advanced in the global health and nursing literature including the transformative nature of concepts such as reverse innovation and two-way learning
Summary
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established during the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, marked a pledge by 189 nations to foster international relations with shared values of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility [1]. The 13 million nurses worldwide can promote a “global innovation flow” that is bidirectional, sharing knowledge, skills, ideas, and lessons learned around the world in order to cocreate clinical practice solutions for the world [17, 21] This global innovation flow should be linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”) in a way that seeks to achieve economic, social, and environmental development with hopes of eliminating all forms of poverty [17, 22]. Recommendation Need to participate in the conversation at every level (e.g., academic, association, and policy) and develop emotional intelligence Help nurses develop competencies and attributes for engagement in global health reform Promote networking, collaboration, nonhierarchical relationships, and common goals Need inquiry approach situated within a cultural-competency framework Embrace One World, One Health contexts, being inclusive of other disciplines to explore the complex nature of the problem, and finding alternate and creative solutions. To ensure an effective healthcare system that is accessible, safe, effective, and affordable around the world, nurses need to change the conversion to influence policy (health and social) [25]
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