Nursing NOW’s Nightingale Challenge

The Nursing Now global movement aims to support nurses and midwives at every stage in their careers to be influential leaders, through creating more ways they can be nurtured and recognised alongside other young professionals.

One of these ways is through Nursing Now’s ambitious Nightingale Challenge. Its goal is that by the end of 2020, there will be 20,000 nurses and midwives across the world, equipped and empowered to spearhead a culture change of influential leadership in their profession.

The Challenge is asking every health employer around the world to provide leadership and development training for a group of their young nurses and midwives during 2020, the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, to support them as practitioners, and enhance their skills as advocates and leaders in health.

‘Our ambition is to nurture and support the talent and potential that already exist in our young nurses and midwives across the world,’ says Professor Lisa Bayliss-Pratt, who is Programme Lead for the Challenge. ‘An investment like this is a simple and direct way of demonstrating how much we value our future nurse leaders. The Challenge is a way of recognising the crucial contribution they can make to securing universal health coverage and improving the quality of care for their communities.’

“It is essential that nurses are enabled to play a bigger role in multi-disciplinary teams, working to their full potential to innovate, to lead and to advocate,” said Annette Kennedy, President of the International Council of Nurses. “We hear, time and again, that nurses are being held back as leaders. We need to seize the opportunity that 2020 gives us to shape a different future for our profession by investing in the next generation. By accepting the Nightingale Challenge we give them new skills, experiences and confidence – together we will take down the barriers that hold nurses back and see our profession soar to greater heights.”

“The support of the Burdett Trust for Nursing has been instrumental in creating a global social movement of nurses and non-nurses who united in efforts to raise the status and profile of nursing,” said Dr Barbara Stillwell, Executive Director for Nursing Now. “We have had a terrific response from employers since the launch of the Nightingale Challenge with 100 signed up in the first three weeks alone.”

The Nightingale Challenge aims to have at least 20,000 nurses and midwives aged 35 and under benefiting from this in 2020, with at least 1,000 employers taking part.

They will be offered the opportunity to join leadership and development programmes, tailored to local needs, resources and priorities, which will support their own skills and development, bring added value to their organisations, and help raise the profile and status of both professions.

Examples of programmes could include any mix of formal courses, mentoring, shadowing or learning from other professionals or sectors.

Find out more and watch a short film about the Nightingale Challenge here.

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