YSN—The Next 100 Years

August 23, 2024

This year marked the 100th anniversary of the Yale School of Nursing’s founding. It was a time for celebration, reflection on our past accomplishments, and consideration of our future aspirations. Throughout the year, a series of events allowed us to honor our history while maintaining a forward-looking perspective.

YSN is renowned for being the first school to prepare nurses under an educational rather than apprenticeship model, establishing what is now known as the Graduate Entry Pre-Specialty in Nursing (GEPN) program, and bringing the hospice movement to the United States by building the country’s first inpatient hospice, among many other pioneering achievements.

From its inception, YSN pioneered a new paradigm for nursing as a profession of highly skilled practitioners, clinical experts, and scientific researchers. The centennial milestone served as a platform to consider and address longstanding issues related to health disparities, and inspired us to look ahead to what the next one hundred years will mean to nursing, nursing education, and health care.

I believe we will see a profound expansion and transformation of the American (and ultimately the global) healthcare system—a transformation in which nursing and YSN will play a leading role.

The future will see a profound change of perspective that results in an increasing investment of human and fiscal resources in wellness—how best to attain it and how best to maintain it in an equitable way for all people, with an emphasis on increasing the healthspan—the period of life during which we have satisfactory mental and physical health. This effort will be accelerated by progress in individualized health, with prevention and health promotion that takes into account an individual’s genetic makeup life history, demographics, and many other factors.

We expect that our future will include a center dedicated to research and discovery about aging well. This center will serve as a hub for innovation, education, policy, research, and best practices, positioning YSN at the forefront of this crucial and rapidly evolving field. By emphasizing precision wellness, we will contribute to the body of knowledge directed at tailoring health interventions to individual patients, improving outcomes and promoting longevity.

YSN’s future includes fulfilling its mission of contributing to “better health for all people.” This means healthcare that is more equitable, more accessible, and that eliminates disparities in outcomes. Without equitable access to primary care, healthcare disparities will remain.

A future with improved healthcare access and equity will require that nurses be more frequently and effectively deployed as providers of primary care, where they will be part of interprofessional teams as well as individual practitioners.

YSN is a leader in educating nurses who earn advanced degrees and certifications, making them well qualified to provide urgently needed primary care. The diversity of people we are educating will be reflected in the many nurse practitioners who return to their communities—including historically underserved communities—to provide primary care that is competent, culturally responsive, economical, and accessible.

As part of assuring that diversity, we have a goal of creating endowed funding that will enable us to offer sustainable debt-free nursing education, thus eliminating one of the major barriers for people from underserved historically excluded communities who aspire to be advanced practice nurses.

The next 100 years will bring many new technologies and techniques—in learning, research, and healthcare service—from artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, sophisticated remote monitoring of vital signs to gene editing and vastly improved imaging capabilities. Many of these will have an impact on both nursing education and research as well as clinical practice.

In the next 100 years, nursing research will expand significantly. People often don’t realize that we educate many nurses to the PhD and DNP level, and that these nurses go on to do research on everything from the social and political determinants of health to maintaining and improving wellness and understanding the causes of and cures for major health challenges. This research will be increasingly important as we face the unique and rapidly-accumulating threats to wellness caused by climate change. We are pursuing funding that will enable us to be at the forefront of educating nurses so they can anticipate and have a meaningful impact on climate-related health issues.

Creating transformational change requires vision and leadership. YSN is educating the nurses who will provide that vision and leadership for their profession, and for the entire healthcare system.