About the campaign

Make this a year for nursing!

‘You are among the most trusted people in the world. However a lot of people say "thank God you are there, but I would not want to be a nurse"……You have to change that!’ These were the words of advice from Christopher Bunting, a marketing expert, to a room packed with nurses from across the globe at last year’s meeting of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in Geneva.

And it was those words that inspired Nursing Standard to launch a campaign — 'Nursing the Future'.

We want to make 2004 a year for nursing. With your help, we want to enhance the image and reputation of nurses and nursing in the UK. We want to re-brand nursing for the 21st century and we’d really like you to join us.

Public attitude surveys have consistently shown that the public has very mixed views about nursing and what nurses do. But is that altogether surprising when nurses are not good at selling themselves and ‘talking up’ what they do?

And yet we all know that there is much to celebrate about what nurses all over the UK are achieving for patients every day.

Our campaign grew out of a campaign that has been running in the US since last year — ‘The Campaign for Nursing’s Future’. Backed by Johnson and Johnson, it has not only already succeeded in making nursing a more popular career choice in the States, but it has given the nursing workforce a much needed morale boost.

Being proud of what you do can really make a difference to how we think of ourselves, and how we sell ourselves to other professions and the public at large. And nurses in the UK have a lot to be proud of.
Unlike any other campaign that Nursing Standard has run in the past, this campaign will run for a year. We will profile excellence. We will discover what patients find special and difficult about nursing. We will catalogue progress.

And this campaign will be driven by real nurses - not journalists writing about nursing. We have handpicked a representative sample of real nurses from across the UK who will become ‘ambassadors’ — they will be the face and voice of this campaign.

We hope they will inspire you to tell us your stories, what you love about your job, what challenges you face, what inspires you to keep going. We also hope that more of you out there will want to join our team of nurse ambassadors.

We hope you will join us in celebrating what is dynamic, complex and challenging about our profession. We hope you will sign up to keeping the essence of nursing alive in the 21st century and to making sure the path ahead is as dynamic and progressive as it has ever been. Join us in nursing the future.