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In celebration of the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife, the U21 Health Sciences Nursing & Midwifery Group hosted a three-part webinar series titled Professional Nursing: Past, Present and Future. The event brought together nurses and nursing students from our U21 Health Sciences Group members from around the world to reflect on the contribution of our profession, and how it continues to evolve.

To reflect the broad, holistic scope of the nursing profession, the webinar series was underpinned by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide a framework within which to situate health in the broadest social, economic, and environmental context. The SDGs remind us to avoid taking an overly narrow view of healthcare, and to instead approach health and health promotion by fostering environments and societies in which people can thrive and prevent diseases.

Amongst healthcare professions and disciplines, nursing has traditionally taken a comparatively broad view of socioeconomic determinants of health. The SDGs invite an even broader consideration of the scope of nursing to include the interactions and interdependencies between human health, animal health, and environmental health.

Webinar 1: Nursing in the New Era of Infection and Communicable Disease: 2020 and Beyond

The emergence of novel infections such as, HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola and now COVID-19, are the result of widespread degradation the environment in which we live. Globally, destruction of natural habitats, urbanisation, populatioWebinar 1: Nursing in the New Era of Infection and Communicable Disease: 2020 and Beyondn densification and mobilisation create the ideal conditions for new diseases to evolve and then be transmitted to humans. In this webinar we aim to share and learn from the recent experiences of our international counterparts in the role nurses have and continue to play in preventing, predicting, and responding to the COVID 19 pandemic.

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Webinar 2: Courage in Nursing: What it looks like and why it is needed now, more than ever

What is courage? What does it look like in nursing? Has courage changed as a result of the pandemic? These questions are probably ones that we have rarely paused to consider, but they are salient in the context of the global pandemic. This webinar focuses on courage in nursing, encouraging response and debate to its contemporary meanings and will draw on the following themes:

  • - Courage to Overcome Convention

  • - Courage on the Front Line

  • - Courage to Influence

Webinar 3: Working with COVID-19: Policy and service responses

This webinar examines aspects of the health system response to the pandemic in Ireland within acute care and residential care services. It examines the initial level of preparedness for the impact of the first wave in residential care and considers the health system response. The webinar also presents the design and preliminary findings from a study that examined healthcare staff experiences of team working in response to COVID-19 pandemic in the hospital setting and offers some emerging evidence of changes that have occurred within teamwork during the initial period of the health system response.

The webinar provided participants with the opportunity to discuss new learnings from the initial health system response to COVID-19 in Ireland as well as the opportunity to ask our speakers questions as part of the panel discussion.