¶ … IOM Future of Nursing Report The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), which is located in Princeton, New Jersey and was founded from the Johnson & Johnson fortunes, is the largest health-focused philanthropy in the United States. The foundation provides grant money to successful applicants seeking to improve the health of U.S. citizens and to improve the provision of American health care. Grants offered by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are sizable, collectively amounting to approximately $400,000 million annually, and address a variety of health issues including these major categories: access to care, obesity in children, and training for doctors and nurses. Grants are often awarded for topics tangential to healthcare, such as access to fresh food, poverty and housing quality, and violence. Research conducted at the Institute of Medicine has contributed to the efforts of the Institute and RWJF to design, articulate, and implement nurse-led models of innovative practice with the potential to improve and transform healthcare systems in the United States.

The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, the report completed by the Institute of Medicine is a comprehensive exploration of the role of nurses in healthcare systems as they currently exist and the potential transformative options that hold promise of substantively improving healthcare in the U.S. The report considers the increasingly complex and growing healthcare needs of the diverse and aging American population. A focus of the report recommendations is the nexus between nursing workforce readiness and the healthcare needs of people across their lifespans. The report intends an extensive reach, making recommendations for challenges that have been resistant to change, are pervasive across healthcare systems, and are truly...

The recommendations are designed to reform health care and the public healthcare systems by describing pathways to increase the capacity of the nursing educational programs in order to better address nursing shortages, and how to deliver nursing services in the interim in what will inevitably be a shortage environment. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that, "the U.S. will require 1.2 million new RNs by 2014 to meet the nursing needs of the country, 500,000 to replace those leaving practice and an additional 700,000 new RNs to meet growing demands for nursing services" (Portera, 2009).
The report recommendations address all levels of institutional policies. The report concludes that nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training which will ensure seamless academic progression, and ultimately position them to practice to the full extent of the education and training they have received. The redesign of health care in the United States should be conducted through a full partnership between nurses, physicians, and other health care provider professionals. In order to conduct effective policy-making and implement efficacious workforce planning, the data collected, analyzed, and disseminated must be improved, which will require funding improved infrastructure.

The state-based action coalitions associated with the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action are a grassroots network of committed stakeholders who are actively engage in local and state level work with the intention of transforming healthcare via nursing. The coalitions are able to advance the goals of the campaign by capitalizing on the unique attributes of the states in which they reside. For instance, the network of stakeholders…