Commentary: The Need for Baccalaureate Education Now More than Ever: Implications for the Role of Nurse Leaders.

Abstract

Globally, healthcare systems have been pushed to the breaking point. The demands for public health and community-based care - traditionally underfunded - have escalated. Necessity expedited the use of technology for virtual care delivery within the Canadian healthcare system and in post-secondary education, overcoming years of resistance. Now, more than ever, transformation of nursing curricula is critical to the socialization of our professional identity, what nursing values and what it means to be a nurse who can demonstrate capabilities that go far beyond the image of the pandemic proclamations of nurses as heroes (Goodolf and Godfrey 2021). Sustaining the changes that have supported access to healthcare delivery and post-secondary education throughout the pandemic will require vision and leadership. It will mean positioning nursing within the health professions to have a voice of influence, be visible, be recognized as essential to decisions that affect health and inform healthcare directions that are equity oriented and grounded in the social determinants of health and social justice.