Mark Lazenby, PhD, RN, FAAN
Dean and Professor
We humans are amazing and ingenious. We innovate, collaborate, and communicate together to improve the lives of others. Humans advancing other humans has been our story for hundreds of thousands of years.
However, vulnerability is also part of that story. To be alive, after all, is to be vulnerable to harm and, ultimately, to death. Since we are human, nursing’s province covers every one of us – including nurses themselves. In our moment of vulnerability, we are in greatest need of a compassionate, knowledgeable, and skillful professional caregiver and dedicated advocate. Probably before we can remember, and certainly before we die, all of us will have had reason to be grateful for the care of a good nurse.
Because humans always have – and will – need nurses, nurses have always been part of the human story. As our readers will already have spotted, this integral relationship of nurses to humanity, and humanity to nurses, is expressed in the name of this magazine: Humanitas.
It must be acknowledged, nonetheless, that some people are more vulnerable than others. Vulnerability increases not only through disease, accident, or age, as any one of us may experience, but because the societal wrongs that amplify vulnerability do not fall equally on all people. Structural inequities relating to race, economic status, and other categories of social marginalization reduce both access to healthcare and the foundational ability to sustain a healthy life. Daily, nurses witness the sorrows and frustrations of people who struggle against the odds of social and racial injustice to achieve even basic health.
Our belief in the need to tackle these injustices, and how we mean to go about it, is the subject of the UCI Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing’s five-year strategy. Rather than a standard strategic plan, ours is a manifesto: a public declaration of our intentions – our beliefs and our motives for acting – as a nursing community. Our manifesto’s scope includes the global issues of climate change and collective trauma, and the profession’s role in addressing these. This issue also spotlights the efforts of our faculty, and alumni, in serving the most vulnerable in our society – stories I’m sure will resonate with you.
These stories will resonate for one simple reason: whether you are a nurse or not, you know that nurses care for humanity.
