Abstract
Like many retired people, I’ve recently been finding ways to stave off lockdown cabin fever – most have been linked to food or entertainment, but I’ve also been scanning my bookshelves for unread or forgotten texts of any genre. One book jumped out at me – not a novel, a travel guide or a cookbook but a how-to book, given to me several years ago by a Canadian colleague. Its title ‘From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public’ seemed too apt for it to remain on the shelf. The first sentence that my eyes fell on provoked me to consider ‘how things would be if the voice and visibility of nursing were commensurate with the size and importance of nursing in health care’ (p. 11). What a thought – especially in these times. Such impact, could that really happen?
I sifted through my recollections of the 20 years that had passed since the book was published and asked myself if nurses had found a louder, clearer voice in that time. The answer, of course, was equivocal – yes, and no. There was certainly cause to celebrate: more educational opportunities, more specialised roles, more research opportunities, more political clout and more recognition; but there was also room for improvement in all of these and other areas. On balance, I felt that nursing's voice had been hushed rather than emboldened, not just because we are locally and globally in short supply, still needing ‘9 million more nurses and midwives … to achieve universal health coverage by 2030’ (WHO 2020) but also because we had fallen from prominence and public favour, our reputation tarnished and our conventional leaders largely inaudible.
However, despite this quietening, nurses – now critical to overcoming the pandemic – are being heard again; they are constantly in the thoughts of the public, politicians and policy makers as well as the focus of daily media attention and news broadcasts – their expertise, courage, adaptability and views matter. No nurse would have wanted a pandemic to be the way through which their voice was heard again, especially during a year designated as celebratory for nurses and midwives (WHO 2020), but COVID-19 does seem to have enabled the unmuffling of ‘What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public’.
It is ironic that our celebratory year, gate-crashed by a voiceless pathogen, has brought us more recognition, and a louder, clearer voice than we had. Of course, we can still marvel at nurses, cheer them for their skills, courage and adaptability, feel their discomfort and distress with the now at-a-distance caring they need to enact, and support their pleas for more protective equipment and better resources, but we cannot celebrate in the way we intended when 2020 started. We have no stomach for celebration; any cheeriness has been replaced by apprehension, risk, fear and death.
JRN's purpose is to give voice to knowledge and critical opinion, to enable nurses to gain the attention they and their work deserve, and to improve practice and policy by bringing developments in research and care to the fore. This issue gives voice to authors and commentators doing so across a wide range of activities: it highlights work on shared governance, the often-hidden role of clinical research nurses, the development of consensus around blood-glucose monitoring, and the investigation of nurses' knowledge and practice of complementary and alternative medicine. Moreover, and particularly germane to the notion of giving voice, two nurse leaders, one from Canada and the other working with the World Health Organisation, describe how their voices and practices became bolder.
We know at JRN that all nurses must be bold at this time, and must be heard. We applaud your extraordinary work.