With huge pressures on the workforce plan to fill staffing gaps and applications for nursing degrees dropping by 27% over the last three years, the nursing voice has never been more powerful. There’s so much work to be done, but we can’t do it without our members.
This is why we’re introducing the Activism Academy. A new initiative from the RCN with one core mission: to encourage and enable members to get active and make positive change.
Members are right to be upset and angry at the impact on the workforce, their patients and wider society. We hope that by bringing over half a million nursing staff together under one banner, we can show that together it’s possible to turn the tide. That’s our unique role as both a trade union and professional body.
This requires members to be bold leaders, and thankfully we have no shortage of them – in every care setting, from every stage of the nursing career path, right across the UK. Some of them are already involved in the organisation’s work. The Activism Academy aims to drive more active members, and more impact.
We’ll do this by focusing on 3 key areas:
1. We want to build empowering and enabling environments, structures and networks for members to take up an RCN activist role. That could be as a workplace rep, or professional forum committee member or one of our many other roles.
2. We want to get members organising together in their workplaces and the wider profession to identify issues facing them. We’ll equip them to make change and challenge discrimination and oppression.
3. We want to ensure that the resources, tools, learning and development available for RCN activists is second to none.
I’m proud to be the Associate Director of the Activism Academy – the member of staff who leads the delivery of its work, in close collaboration with elected members on our Trade Union Committee and Professional Nursing Committee.
There’s a substantial and proud history in the UK of nursing activism. By embracing the role of the activist professional – and the professional activist – nursing can continue to be a force to be reckoned with.
