Practice Matters

The Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation™ Grand Challenge—Join now!

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The first day of May marked the launch of the Healthy Nurse, Healthy NationGrand Challenge. The goal of the Challenge is to transform the health of the nation by improving the health of the nation’s 3.6 million RNs, working with individual nurses and partner organizations to take action within five domains: activity, sleep, nutrition, quality of life, and safety.

What’s a grand challenge?

Grand Challenges involve bold, socially beneficial goals that address a systemic and embedded problem through collaboration and joint leadership. The framework for Grand Challenges is based on the research of Christina D. Economos, PhD, and others, in determining the key elements needed to activate positive behavior change in a large population. Large-scale changes in areas such as recycling, breastfeeding, and seatbelt use, resulted from collective actions made at the individual, interpersonal, workplace, community, and policy levels. The Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation Grand Challenge follows this model.

Join the movement!

You can join the Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation Grand Challengewhere you can participate in Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation™ Connect, a digital platform that inspires action, cultivates friendly competition, and provides content and resources. Within the digital platform, you can take a comprehensive health survey, which provides a mechanism for ANA and its partners to track progress over time and to measure the collective impact of the initiative. This institutional review board–approved survey includes questions about work environment, physical activity, nutrition, quality of life, and safety. You’ll be prompted to retake the survey annually.

ANA is seeking organizational partners to join the initiative. Three levels of partnership are available—Premier Partner, Partner, and Friend—and partners may include (but aren’t limited to):

• employers of nurses

• state nurses associations

• specialty nurses associations

• nursing schools

• healthcare organizations

• consumer organizations.

We ask organizational partners to make a specific commitment to help make nurses healthier. This can include anything from healthier foods at conferences or in the cafeteria to walking competitions, workplace napping policies, improved safe patient handling and mobility programs, or just helping spread the word about the Challenge.

If you have questions, please contact healthynurse@ana.org.

Jaime Murphy Dawson is director, Program Operations in Nursing Practice and Innovation at ANA.

Reference

Economos, C. What lessons have been learned from other attempts to guide social change? Nutrition Reviews. 2001;59(3):S40-S56.

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