Nursing management and leadership — the challenge

Abstract

This chapter will begin and end with the same message. The message is that all developments in nursing*, and indeed, all events in the world in which we live, should be judged against the climate and culture of their day. The development of nursing leadership is no exception. To judge developments and events without taking account of the broader social and health worlds of which nursing is a part is to see only one corner of a larger picture. So it is with the beginning of formal nursing leadership. The first notable nursing leader was Florence Nightingale but notable especially because of the prevailing climate and culture of her early pioneering days in the nineteeth century. The relevance of social class, the prevalence of disease — many now largely extinct in the Western World — and the position of women in society, all contributed to the circumstances of the day which made Nightingale such a lasting figure and symbol in the annals of nursing history.