Nightingale’s first recommendation was the need to prioritize positive health and its determinants. She saw the impetus for good health as the individual commitment towards realizing positive health determinants. Nightingale saw nurses as important players in the process of promoting positive health determinants. The culture of caring should be furthered by nurses even in the future. Good health in the future will be attained by first valuing the nurses as important players in promoting health.
The second recommendation by Nightingale was that nurses should be valued and sustained. Although she emphasized about valuing nurses, she also meant that every individual involved in promoting health should be valued. Nightingale went her way to reach to others to collaborate in promoting health. The future of nursing lies in encouraging collaborations with people from all walks of life who seek to promote determinants of positive health.
Nightingale saw it useful to educate people on the need to stay healthy. She recommended the need for individuals and the larger society to be knowledgeable about staying healthy. She knew that realizing the global idea of health had to start from the grassroots. Nightingale understood that health education could be done in both formal and informal ways. She saw the need to inform their leaders about health issues affecting the people. Nightingale saw the nurse as an individual who should promote health literacy by coming up with modules that can teach health in a holistic manner at all levels of the society. Despite her emphasis on learning and teaching about health, Nightingale strongly emphasized that applying knowledge was a crucial component of learning. In the future, nurses will play a central role in promoting positive health determinants by teaching individuals about positive health.
Nightingale promoted the idea of making known the health issues to the public through public opinion. She encouraged the public to push their leaders to address health issues. She believed in using the different media platforms to highlight health issues. She urged the idea of working behind the scenes, which nurses still promote today. However, Nightingale still called for public opinion to be formed to make the voices of everyone be heard in the course of promoting health. Nurses must know how to use public media to communicate health issues through the various media platforms as a way of forming public opinion.
The fifth recommendation by Nightingale focused on the idea that the health of individuals and the entire nation depends on holistic determinants. In this regard, the “physical, emotional, mental and spiritual” wellbeing of the individuals determines the state of health (Beck, 2010, p. 322). It is on this premise that Nightingale suggested that addressing the health of an individual at the local level was one big step towards ensuring the health of the entire nation. In other words, all players must promote health in their own small and big ways, starting locally and progressing globally.
The sixth recommendation by Knightdale emphasized on the need for issues of health to be approached in a holistic manner and across disciplines. In other words, she believed that nurses should become advocates of good health and sacrifice their lives to attend to human health. She urged people to take nursing as an inner calling that is done to promote the greater good and not personal interest. Successful nursing in the future will rely on the extent to which nurses will take the career as a calling and not an end in itself.
Nightingale recommended that nurses ought to be the change agents who are supposed to come up with innovative practices that can deal with the current health problems. She emphasized that nurses can lead as global visionaries who are advocates of human health at every level in the society. Current and future nursing practice will rely heavily on evidence-based practice.
Reference
Beck, D-M. (2010). Expanding our Nightingale horizon: seven recommendations for 21st-century nursing practice. Journal of Holistic Nursing, 28, 317-325. Web.