NURSING

Nursing

Nursing

Introduction

Nursing is the ultimate academic discipline and practice profession to have been shaped by women's leadership. Nursing was historically viewed as an extension of a woman's role in the home. Organized nursing had its roots in religious orders of women and men, such as the Knights Templar, dating back centuries before the era of Florence Nightingale, considered the mother of professional nursing. Professional nursing, with a planned educational program, began with the work of Nightingale, one of two daughters of an English family of wealth and influence.

Discussion

Graduate programs in nursing began to develop in colleges and universities, to prepare nursing faculty. By the mid-1970s, more graduate programs in nursing were preparing nurses for advanced clinical practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, a few doctoral programs in nursing were scattered across the country, most in large urban areas along the east and west coasts with few in the central part of the country (Buerhaus, Staiger, & Auerbach, 2009; Kalisch & Kalisch, 1995). Many doctoral prepared nurses seeking faculty positions earned their degrees in related disciplines, such as education and the social sciences, because of the lack of access to doctoral education in nursing. Doctoral education in nursing only became more widely available during the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

In the fall of 2008, 158 doctoral programs in nursing were offered in universities across the United States, with dozens more schools reporting doctoral programs in planning stages (AACN, 2008b). Doctoral education in nursing began a dramatic transformation after 2005 through the introduction of a new degree, doctor of nursing practice (D.N.P.). The D.N.P. is a practice degree, not unlike an Ed.D. in education or a D.S.W. in social work. The D.N.P. replaced other nursing practice doctoral degrees (for example, the D.N.S. and D.N. Sc.) and was developed through the efforts of AACN to emphasize the expansion of advanced roles for nurses, radically increasing the number of nursing programs to offer doctoral education (AACN, 2006a). The D.N.P. was not created to eliminate the need for the research doctoral degree in nursing (the Ph.D.) but to provide a more appropriate path for doctoral education for clinical leaders. The creation of this practice degree was consistent with a series of recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences (AACN, 2005), which included increasing the number of nurses who can serve as clinical faculty and doctoral prepared practitioners.

During the first decades of the 20th century, nurses made a difference in the health of the poor through the services of public health nursing. Lillian Wald was one of the pioneers of public health nursing, serving the poor who lived in the tenements of New York City. With Mary Brewster, she created a Nurses' Settlement House, which became the Henry Street Settlement House, on the lower East Side, providing a visiting nurse service to the poor. This program evolved into the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, provided health care to thousands every year and served as a model for other community health programs across the United States ...