2020 A Significant Year for HKU and Global Nursing
In this International Year of the Nurse and Midwife honouring the 200th birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, I am excited to announce the 25th Anniversary of School of Nursing, The University of Hong Kong (HKU). As nurses globally are achieving so much through standing on the shoulders of the giants who have led the way in nursing and health care over the last two centuries, the HKU School of Nursing has also benefitted from the achievements of its visionary stewardship over the past quarter century. It is now timely to focus on building for our nursing future in this age of accelerated technological innovation, global uncertainties and challenging health priorities
The School of Nursing is committed to fostering future nursing leaders in clinical practice, policy, education and research who will spearhead innovation, adapt to change and nurture sustainable development. These capabilities will be critically important as we move towards even more complex, technology enabled and rapidly changing modes of health care.
Our interprofessional education programme is extremely important in the preparation of leaders for these multifarious environments. It enables us to provide students aspiring to leadership roles with the knowledge and skills to participate proactively in interdisciplinary teams, where they collaborate, communicate and share resources to solve complex health problems. Together with our excellent clinical programme, graduates with this background are in an excellent position to engage in a range of advanced practice and other clinical leadership roles.
The School has partnerships with many universities around the world which enable student exchange and joint research endeavours. Students can now also engage in a programme of life enrichment learning activities outside Hong Kong.
These may include learning activities outside the nursing discipline, research participation and community service engagement. Together with their international and regional exchanges, these experiences provide rich and often profound understandings of socio-cultural, political and economic factors impacting upon people’s lives. Students are thus developing a global awareness and value system which supports flexibility and openness to other people’s cultures, enabling diversity and innovation to be cultivated. Their experiences fit them well to become policy advocates, providing a voice for the community and nursing leadership in practice and education in a complex and rapidly changing world.
Permeating all our education endeavours is a commitment to research and scholarship. Our graduates have a rigorous research mindedness and are well prepared to engage in interdisciplinary collaborative research. A strategic aim of our researchers is to contribute to improvements in healthcare and public health through working with big data to enable precision personalised health care.
Our strategic vision for the future seems a long way from the far-sighted achievements of Florence Nightingale. Yet there is a continuity which resides in our concern to always place the interests of our patients first.