Nursing Professional Organizations: What Are They Doing to Engage Nurses in Health Policy?

Nurses have great potential to contribute to the development of health policy through political action. We undertook a systematic website review of international- and national-level professional nursing organizations to determine how they engaged registered nurses in health policy activities, including policy priority setting, policy goals and objectives, policy products, and mechanisms for engaging nurses in policy issues. We reviewed 38 organizations for eligibility and 15 organization websites met our inclusion criteria. Six professional nursing organizations had comprehensive websites with a discussion of specific policy goals and objectives, policy-related products and mechanisms for nurses to become engaged. Future research is needed to evaluate how nursing professional organizations establish policy priorities and to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies used to politically engage nurses.