About Us

We engage with nurses and midwives as caring pioneers, scientists and influencers – people who can drive and lead innovation and impact.

• The Edinburgh Global Nursing Initiative shines a light on how we as a University work with partners to strengthen nursing and midwifery across the world, and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.

• Our approach to education, advanced clinical practice, research, policy and meaningful collaborations, enables leadership within nursing and midwifery at all levels.  

We see nurses and midwives as drivers of change – active contributors to a better world for all. 

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Our Purpose

We support and empower nurses and midwives globally to make significant improvements in care and health.

To achieve our purpose, we work to four objectives:

1. Advance research, education and practice rooted in evidence 

2. Embed leadership development in all education and research programmes

3. Amplify and strengthen what nurses and nurse communities are already doing in practice and policy influence

4. Develop and advocate for the role and impact of nursing globally

Our Vision

Every nurse and midwife is enabled to lead in their sphere of practice and influence, being agents of transformation in delivering patient and population health outcomes.

We want the full impact of nursing and midwifery on population health and care to be elevated and leveraged to its full potential. 

Ultimately we want evidence-led universal health care available and delivered to all.

By empowering nurses and challenging the status quo, we seek to enact change at the highest level.

What we want to see:

• The evidence base of the positive impact of nursing is strengthened and widely available.
• Nursing communities are driving change and innovation. They have a strong perception of their role as change agents and are positioned at every level of political decision making.
• Governments and communities locally and globally are leveraging and elevating the asset of nurses and midwives to enhance the physical, mental, social and economic wellbeing of populations. 

Our Global Nursing Initiative is focused on areas of greatest health and social care need – particularly low and middle income countries – where the health workforce and health systems may be in development and impacted by global injustices, disease outbreaks, poverty and conflict. We work to support nurses and midwives at the intersection of Universal Health Coverage and Sustainable Development Goals.

• Read more about global health and the Sustainable Development Goals on our Global Health Academy website.

Nurses and midwives can, and do, profoundly impact population health outcomes and wellbeing, yet their contribution, leadership role and influence is not always recognised, understood or nurtured. 

Nurses and nursing communities around the world face huge challenges and inequalities in the profession. 

The Triple Impact Report highlights how nurses and nursing communities contribute in profound and diverse ways to global health and development. It argues that:

1. Developing and investing in nursing will improve health, promote gender equality and support economic growth. 

2. Universal Health Coverage is unachievable without strengthening nursing globally; and 

3. There is an urgent need globally to raise the profile of nursing and enable nurses to work to their full potential if countries are to indeed achieve Universal Health Coverage. 

The work of the Edinburgh Global Nursing Initiative is designed to help address challenges and inequalities in the profession, and enable nursing to have these profound and achievable impacts. 

• Read the full Triple Impact Report 

Our work helps to advance the ambitions of Nursing Now and its legacy – a global campaign to improve health by raising the status and profile of nursing. In response to the Triple Impact Report, Nursing Now focuses in five core areas:

1. Ensuring that nurses and midwives have a more prominent voice in health policy-making; 

2. Encouraging greater investment in the nursing workforce; 

3. Advocating for more nurses in leadership positions; 

4. Encouraging research that helps determine where nurses can have the greatest impact, and 

5. Sharing examples best nursing practice.

Links

• Nursing Now website

• The Nightingale Challenge – a Nursing Now initiative focused on leadership development and training for young nurses and midwives