HJBR May/Jun 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  MAY / JUN 2024 41 Karen C. Lyon, PhD, MBA, APRN-CNS, NEA Chief Executive Officer Louisiana State Board of Nursing it also demonstrated the agility and resil- ience of our frontline nursing workforce. Our strengths represent opportunities to achieve and sustain a nursing workforce of diversity and expertise to achieve equity in health outcomes and reverse the his- torically poor health status seen in many communities across this nation. During this week and throughout the month of May, we hope you recognized and cele- brated nurses by expressing your gratitude for the invaluable contributions they make to your health and the health of our com- munity. n REFERENCES 1 Wikipedia. “Florence Nightingale.” Last edited April 4, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flor- ence_Nightingale 2 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. “The Future of Nursing 2020- 2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equi- ty.” Consensus Study Report, May 11, 2021. doi: 10.17226/25982 • Karen Wyble, DNP, vice president of regional community affairs at Ochs- ner Lafayette General, lead the task force that developed and published the Health Disparities in Rural Areas Legislative Playbook to achieve the goals of: • Changing health policies to sup- port equity in healthcare. • Helping patients invest in their own health by focusing on a work- force that is diversified. • Reducing the number of health professional shortage areas. • Investing in virtual medicine with an understanding that rural medi- cine is not urban medicine. • Investing in community health workers to support providers in rural areas to understand the social determinants for each population. • Investing in community safety through infrastructure upgrades. • Nursing leadership coordinated with the Board of Regents to determine the best policies for increasing the healthcare workforce, especially nursing faculty recruitment, improv- ing salaries to facilitate nurse faculty recruitment, practice-academic part- nerships, and increasing the pipeline for health workers. • APRNs collaborated with state offi- cials to pass Act 296 allowing for sig- nature authority for APRNs to issue certification of illness and extended sick leave for teachers, teaching staff, and bus drivers. • The role of RNs was strengthened and supported in the outpatient setting and creating transformations in nursing regulation to support a “just culture” regarding discipline and assisting nurses with substance use disorders. • Louisiana nurses coordinated with the Mississippi Board of Nursing to develop their Office of NursingWork- force. The nursing workforce in the U.S. is the largest among all health profession- als and is nearly four times the size of the physician workforce. 2 Nurses practice in a wide variety of settings and provide care to the most vulnerable of our citizens in- cluding the aged, people of color, native Americans, low-income individuals, and many citizens with physical and mental disabilities. Our care benefits individu- als, communities, and societies. While the COVID-19 pandemic strained the health- care infrastructure throughout the world,