Gaps in healthcare delivery and health outcomes are wide, persistent, and increasing in communities throughout the United States—especially among historically underrepresented and excluded groups. Addressing the systemic challenges of structural racism, political conflict, social unrest, and climate change requires interdisciplinary collaboration and consideration of the social and structural determinants of health (SSDH). Nursing Leaders Driving Health Equity: Tackling Social and Structural Determinants is the first comprehensive guide to integrate SSDH into nursing and interdisciplinary programs, curricula, and practice to combat the complex factors impacting health equity. Case studies and practical advice from experienced nursing educators, administrators, and practitioners provide a framework for the development, integration, discussion, and assessment of SSDH in teaching, learning, and practice environments. This empowering, easy-to-use guide helps you: * Design effective educational strategies integrating SSDH into existing curricula and prepare students to address the social challenges impacting their patients’ health outcomes. * Develop holistic and sustainable infrastructures, policies, and workflows focusing on identification of patients who need referrals for intervention and evaluation for outcomes related to SSDH. * Apply research and evidence-based practice related to SSDH to help identify patients with unmet needs and refer them to community resources and support services. * Implement guidelines that support the integration of SSDH into healthcare practice.

The decade ahead will test the nation's nearly 4 million nurses in new and complex ways. Nurses live and work at the intersection of health, education, and communities. Nurses work in a wide array of settings and practice at a range of professional levels. They are often the first and most frequent line of contact with people of all backgrounds and experiences seeking care and they represent the largest of the health care professions. A nation cannot fully thrive until everyone - no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they make - can live their healthiest possible life, and helping people live their healthiest life is and has always been the essential role of nurses. Nurses have a critical role to play in achieving the goal of health equity, but they need robust education, supportive work environments, and autonomy. Accordingly, at the request of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on behalf of the National Academy of Medicine, an ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine conducted a study aimed at envisioning and charting a path forward for the nursing profession to help reduce inequities in people's ability to achieve their full health potential. The ultimate goal is the achievement of health equity in the United States built on strengthened nursing capacity and expertise. By leveraging these attributes, nursing will help to create and contribute comprehensively to equitable public health and health care systems that are designed to work for everyone. The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity explores how nurses can work to reduce health disparities and promote equity, while keeping costs at bay, utilizing technology, and maintaining patient and family-focused care into 2030. This work builds on the foundation set out by The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health (2011) report.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

The crucible of the global pandemic, racial injustice, and a crippling nursing shortage has sparked increasing calls for nursing to address its own problems from inequity to structural racism. In response, authors Susan B. Hassmiller and Gaea A. Daniel enlisted nearly 70 national and international nursing leaders to tackle the most pressing issues confronting the profession. Taking Action: Top 10 Priorities to Promote Health Equity and Well-Being in Nursing spotlights 10 critical themes through data, essays, discussion points, and action items, equipping readers to move beyond conversation to action.

The Future of Nursing explores how nurses' roles, responsibilities, and education should change significantly to meet the increased demand for care that will be created by health care reform and to advance improvements in America's increasingly complex health system. At more than 3 million in number, nurses make up the single largest segment of the health care work force. They also spend the greatest amount of time in delivering patient care as a profession. Nurses therefore have valuable insights and unique abilities to contribute as partners with other health care professionals in improving the quality and safety of care as envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted this year. Nurses should be fully engaged with other health professionals and assume leadership roles in redesigning care in the United States. To ensure its members are well-prepared, the profession should institute residency training for nurses, increase the percentage of nurses who attain a bachelor's degree to 80 percent by 2020, and double the number who pursue doctorates. Furthermore, regulatory and institutional obstacles-including limits on nurses' scope of practice-should be removed so that the health system can reap the full benefit of nurses' training, skills, and knowledge in patient care. In this book, the Institute of Medicine makes recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing.

"Health Equity and Nursing: Achieving Equity Through Policy, Population Health, and Interprofessional Collaboration is designed to: 1. Illuminate nursing's role in achieving health equity; 2. Examine current and emerging topics of relevance to achieving health equity; and 3. Articulate future directions for advancing the health equity agenda through nursing education, practice, research and policy advocacy. This textbook consists of 18 chapters divided into three sections. Each chapter includes learning objectives, key terms, key objectives and related resources. The proposed text expands on existing discussions and resources on health equity by including an in-depth overview on health equity coupled with specific implications for the nursing profession. Although there are many nurse leaders who have contributed to this text, we included interprofessional examples and contributors, as well. It is through understanding policy and change, the populations that are most affected by inequalities, and the necessity of interprofessional collaboration that we can move the needle on achieving health equality"--

This book provides an application of the concepts and recommendations of The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity Report, a Consensus Study from the US National Academy of Medicine. It offers complementary guidance through tools, tips, examples and storytelling. As such this book, written by prominent international academics and nurse practitioners, offers program and policy recommendations for health equity. As the world’s largest and most trusted workforce, nurses are in a key position thus must step up to help address these inequities now. The recent pandemic has laid bare these inequities in ways that are stark and demanding of our attention. This book offers program and policy recommendations, along with case studies, designed to empower nurses to understand and ACT to improve health equity. This text provides nurses an opportunity to clearly see the need for an equitable, just, and fair society. There has never been a more urgent call to action.