A vision for nursing education reform.

Significant changes in nursing education are needed if the profession is to deliver on the promise embedded in Nursing's Agenda for Health Care Reform. In the past, nursing's focus on community-based care was philosophical for the many and actual only for the few who chose to specialize. Now, however, the Agenda for Health Care Reform is being advanced as nursing's alternative vision for health care delivery, and community-based care is increasingly the generalist's rather than the specialist's domain. Preparing all graduates of nursing education programs for community-based care, therefore, becomes the responsibility of all programs and all faculty. Perhaps in varying degrees, but a commonly shared responsibility, nonetheless.

Qui bono? Nursing education in the context of nursing's agenda for health care reform.

Stevens' question "Who Gets Care?" is in the tradition of those arguing for increased access and a more equitable distribution of society's benefits. As such, it provides a framework for nursing scholarship concerned with social as contrasted with individual interventions. Nursing's Agenda for Health Care Reform advances the argument still further by questioning the ideology reinforced by the current system, and offering an alternative system, alternative services and agents. In so doing, the proposed agenda questions the dominant ideology and is, therefore, more accurately a radical departure from the status quo than a reform. While there are some implicit assumptions of both reform and radical change embedded within the work of those addressing a "curriculum revolution," the discussion would benefit from explicit expositions of both the social construction and social function of higher education.

The nursing shortage: dynamics and solutions. Toward the future: how could 2 million registered nurses not be enough?

Qualitative changes in the organization and funding of health care will be necessary if we are to meet the moral challenges of assuring the healthiest population we can. The solution is not more nurses but different nurses.

No sire, it's a revolution.

In much the way 18th century France was ripe for a revolution, so are the two social systems within which we live and work: health care and higher education. In health care, too many are suffering so that a few might live lives of luxury. Higher education is structured so as to reproduce a social order of class privilege and patriarchal values. For a complex set of reasons, (some known to us, many more beyond our consciousness) we have chosen higher education and nursing education as our arena--as the place where we might contribute to the world order, to our society, to individuals and communities who are striving to be healthy. Our project, then, is to enable others so that they might enable still others: to teach and learn with our students who are our colleagues in creating a future; to teach and learn in caring ways that will serve as prototypes for caring communities. To those who would dismiss the curriculum revolution as a fad and those involved it as aging malcontents, I refer them to the diaries of Governor Morris, an American guest of Marie Antoinette who was at Versailles during the months before the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789: Yesterday, it was the Fashion at Versailles not to believe that there had been any disturbances at Paris. I presume this Day's Transactions will induce a Conviction that all is not perfectly quiet (Pernoud, 1960, p. 45).

Re-claiming our communities.

Homelessness, increases in infant mortality, Supreme Court decisions against abortion and affirmative action, and corruption among housing officials are all aspects of the patriarchal control of society that is destroying the health of individuals and communities. Nursing must assume a leadership role not only in offering new ways to structure health care, but in reordering the values of society as a whole.