The Millennium Development Goals make up the action plan created by the United Nations in order to help developing countries improve their living conditions, medical services, educational and social aspects of their people’s lives. This work is aimed at the consideration of the eight Millennium Development Goals with regard to nursing profession.
The legacy of the famous Florence Nightingale cannot but influence the perception of these Millennium Goals. Many of her opinions and attitudes resonate with the Goals, which is impossible to overlook. Florence Nightingale’s avocation was nursing and helping ill. Therefore each and every nurse familiar with her works finds a lot in common between the eight Millennium Goals and Miss Nightingale’s beliefs (Wales, 2004). Combatting diseases, improving maternal health, reducing populations’ mortality rates (child mortality in particular), as well as education and gender equality promotion are among the Goals, and this is what Florence Nightingale has always lobbied for. She is known for having revolutionized the field of nursing, and it is possible to say now that nurses are capable of revolutionizing and making the world a better place. Florence Nightingale’s legacy calls nurses for helping those in pain, and performing the noble task in the global context is what she has wanted nursing to be.
As for the Goals of choice for the author of this report, they are as follows: improving maternal health, empowering women and promoting gender equality, and combatting HIV/AIDS as one of the most deathly diseases for people in developing countries, women in particular. Nurses are not only those who offer medical help and take care of ill people. Their mission and their tasks are much more multifaceted. They may be educators, social workers, counselors and researchers (Pat & Ekpemiro, 2012). Improving maternal health from the perspective of a nurse lies in assuring access to family planning and reproductive health care (Thieren & Beusenberg, 2005), as well as offering women proper conditions for bearing a child. In this context education regarding family planning is a vital task. Execution of this task is closely connected with two other Goals of a choice, since assuring maternal health lies in educating a woman about relations with the opposite sex and planning the pregnancy (or avoiding it if unacceptable). Combatting HIV/AIDS lies in protection and contraception, for as of 2005 nearly half of HIV-positive global population were female (Thieren & Beusenberg, 2005). This implies educating women, especially young, about the risks and types of protection. Finally, gender equality implicates similar choices and possibilities for both male and female populations of developing countries, whatever the field of social or family life. Therefore, assuring women the right and possibility to make the choice and to decide when and how to protect themselves is empowering them. This regards to choosing a partner and the way of contraception (and having contraception in the first place) as well as having access to education and making difference in economic or social life of her country. Teaching women about their rights and possibilities is in this context another role of a nurse.
The community of nurses is truly capable of helping in achieving the Millennium Goals. This particular paper emphasizes on the author’s opinion that a nurse is not only a caregiver, or a medical service provider, but is also a counselor and an educator for those who lack access to education. In this context helping in advancing the Millennium Goals on the part of the nursing community can be performed in two ways. First it is making the healthcare institution in the country/region of interest not only a place where a patient obtains medical care. According to Freedman (2005), health system is also a social institution with many levels, and nurses as a part of this institution are to become agents between the system and its patients, participating in their community and even household lives. Education about hygiene, health, nutrition, contraception, as well as rights and possibilities here plays an important role. Secondly, in means of global nursing workforce nurses may be educators not only for patients but for other nurses, too (Kirk, 2007). Such ‘brain circulation’ assures exchange of experiences, the possibility to learn or share knowledge, which is only beneficial for patients of such proficient nurses.
References
Freedman, L. P. (2005). Achieving the MDGs: Health systems as core social institutions. Development, 48(1), 19-24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.development.1100107
Kirk, H. (2007). Towards a global nursing workforce: The 'brain circulation'. Nursing Management (through 2013), 13(10), 26-30. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/236917441?accountid=50415
Pat, U. O., & Ekpemiro, J. N. (2012). The role of the nurse in achieving Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) in Nigeria by 2015. West African Journal of Nursing, 23(2), 57.
Thieren, M. & Beusenberg, M. (2005). Progress towards the health MDGs. In Dodd, R. (Ed.), Health and the Millennium Development Goals (1). Retrieved from http://www.who.int/hdp/publications/mdg_en.pdf
Wales, R. J. (2004, September 14). The woman who revolutionized nursing; Florence Nightingale knew early: She wanted to care for the sick. The Christian Science Monitor, pp. 13. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/405685673?accountid=50415
