Rohme played host to renowned TEDx speaker Rebecca Love who, in addition to her speaking duties, is President of Sonsiel and VP of OptimizeRX.
Rebecca delivered a captivating talk on the role of nursing in driving healthcare innovation, beginning with a historical tour of the profession. “Nursing has challenged medicine to ensure it understands the value of research and science; challenging what we currently believe to transform it.”
“In my opinion, Florence Nightingale was the ultimate innovator – she basically challenged the status quo to save patients’ lives, and from what I’ve seen throughout history and in in the last 200 years, nurses have constantly innovated to save lives.”
Despite this, nurses historically haven’t been given the platform to use their skills properly.
One issue? Retention. “In the United States we graduate 250,000 nurses per year, but we lose 50% of bedside nurses within the first 2 years.”
The UK is not immune to this trend either, something our CEO Fabio Trovato was quick to point out.
Going forward, Rebecca believes nurses need to be more involved in the day-to-day running of healthcare practices, instead of simply acting as “task managers” with a series of things to tick off a list.
“Nurses have such intrinsic value because they understand everything going on at the bedside and have this 360o worldview of the pain points in the system that many others have no idea about.”
We need to empower “a profession that had largely been disempowered and not been given the runway and bandwidth to be able to change healthcare.”
Until this happens, the system will remain flawed.
We see a broken system, but how can we transform it? Nurses need the freedom to speak up; to impart their expertise; to communicate what they’re seeing with their own eyes.
Until nurses are recognised for their knowledge and expertise, there’ll be “breakage points,” and nurses will remain in the role of “task managers.”
For more information, please view the full interview with Rebecca Love here: