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Nightingale and The UN Global
Goals for Sustainable Development Aiming to Celebrate Her 2020 Bicentenary with Advocacy for a Healthy World |
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Deva-Marie Beck, PhD, RN
May 23, 2016 |
As we prepare to globally celebrate the 2020 Bicentenary of Florence Nightingale's birth, her insights still have fresh relevance to a new vision for achieving a healthy world community — through ‘we the peoples of the United Nations’ — and the 17 UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). In fact, her life and work anticipated these SDGs — all as factors in recovering and maintaining health. Today we would call all these factors 'Health Determinants.'
Sharing this new series of four webpages — featuring all photos and texts represeenting all 17 UN SDGs — and Nightingale's own anticipation of these Goals — is much in keeping with her own reminder to her readers. She said, “We must create a public opinion, which must drive the government instead of the government having to drive us.” (1892)
Sharing this new series of four webpages — featuring all photos and texts represeenting all 17 UN SDGs — and Nightingale's own anticipation of these Goals — is much in keeping with her own reminder to her readers. She said, “We must create a public opinion, which must drive the government instead of the government having to drive us.” (1892)
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Upper Left, the official UN SDGs Color Wheel. Above: Photo of Nightingale in public domain. Left: NIGH.s diagram illustrating the 17 UN SDGs all connecting, like a string of pearls to each other — as key factors or 'health determinants' for achieving a healthy world. The SDG Color Wheel and 17 UN SDG Logos are posted here using the official UN SDG Logo Guidelines.
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SDG #s 1 and 2 seek to “end Poverty in all its forms everywhere” and to “end Hunger and achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” In the 1860s, Nightingale worked to reform the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary where 1,200 impoverished and hungry people were crowded into unsafe, unsanitary conditions. Because of this effort — and at Nightingale’s urging — reform of the entire British workhouse system included — for the first time — placing salaried nurses who addressed these conditions in workhouse settings. |
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Photo Source: Wikimedia. Photo by Josh Estey. Source Food Security, Indonesia, from Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade. Improving productivity and access to markets for agricultural businesses like this peanut producer in Lombok creates economic growth and jobs and reduces poverty. Date 4 May 2009. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. SDG Logos posted using the official UN SDG Guidelines.
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SDG # 3 is the one obvious Goal related to Nightingale’s long lifetime of work. Specifically focused on Health & Well-being — this SDG seeks to ‘ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all, at all ages.’ Of course this Goal is central to Nightingale’s work and to the work of nurses and midwives worldwide. Yet Nightingale saw health through a much wider lens than simply caring for people after they become sick or injured. Nightingale saw that the challenge of improving human health was multi-faceted and holistic. “When we obey all God’s laws as to cleanliness, fresh air, pure water, good habits, good dwellings, good drains, food and drink, work and exercise, health is the result: when we disobey, sickness. 110,000 lives are needlessly sacrificed every year in this kingdom by our disobedience, and 22,000 people are needlessly sick all year round. And why? Because we will not know, will not obey God’s simple Health-laws. No epidemic can resist thorough cleanliness and fresh air.” (1876) |
Photo Source: World Health Organization Media Centre, 2008, Zimbabwe. Photographer: Paul Garwood, used with attribution as specified by WHO. A nurse checks the intravenous (IV) fluid infusion for a patient at a treatment centre in the district of Norton in Zimbabwe, during the cholera outbreak in 2008. Many emergencies occur in remote locations and require strong, flexible and multi-sectoral means of response to save lives and treat the critically ill. SDG Logo # 3 posted using the official UN SDG Guidelines.
Nightingale passionately noted the key connections between education and health, writing, “oh teach health, teach health, health, health, to the rich, and poor, to educated and, if there be any uneducated, oh teach it all the more — to women especially— to young mothers, to young mothers especially!” This perspective is much in keeping with SDG # 4 — to “ensure inclusive and equitable Quality Education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
Photo Source: Central Asian Institute, 2009.
Pakistani girls go to school with support from CAI. Photographer unidentified, used with attribution as specified by the CAI Media webpage. SDG Logo # 4 posted using the official UN SDG Logo Guidelines.
Photo Source: Central Asian Institute, 2009.
Pakistani girls go to school with support from CAI. Photographer unidentified, used with attribution as specified by the CAI Media webpage. SDG Logo # 4 posted using the official UN SDG Logo Guidelines.
Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons & Photographer: Quinet, 2006. Amerindian woman and child in the Sacred Valley, Andes, Peru. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. SDG Logo # 4 posted using the official UN SDG guidelines.
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Nightingale's ideas — to support and encourage young women and women of all ages — anticipated SDG # 5 —to “achieve Gender Equality and empower all women and girls.” In her own time, Nightingale's entire effort — to develop a nursing education curriculum — focused on improving the earning-capacities and living conditions of young women by providing them the means to join a profession that was becoming well-respected because of Nightingale's own example. She deeply pondered the experience of being a woman in a time where gender equality was mostly non-existent. “Women dream till they no longer have the strength to dream: those dreams against which they so struggle — so honestly, so vigorously and conscientiously, and so in vain — yet which are their life.” (1860) |
UN SDG Color Wheel used with official UN SDG Guidelines.