AT THE 2017 UNITED NATIONS 61ST COMMISSION​ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN NEW YORK CITY

An Official United Nations Parallel Event / Co-Sponsored by ICN & NIGH

 We have the knowledge. We have the science. We have the people. But somehow we don't make the impact and that's the issue! 

       As the 2013-2017 President of the International Council of Nurses (ICN), Dr. Judith Shamian recently served on the UN High Commission on Health Employment & Economic Growth. She is also the first such nursing leader to bring ICN’s voice to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York City.
       ​Dr. Shamian is the former President and CEO of the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) and past President of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) and also serves as a professor at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. She has published and spoken extensively nationally and internationally on a wide range of topics.

 It's only when the two come together - civil society and government - that we will make a difference and the world will be a better place. 

       Government departments and agencies and academic bodies — including the World Health Organization (WHO) — often call on her to speak and consult on many issues surrounding nursing, health human resources, leadership, and health-care policy. She established the first WHO Collaborating Centre for Leadership Development in a hospital environment, which brought together nurse executives — from the Caribbean, Israel, Eastern Europe and Africa — to learn more about their role in leading a facility’s nursing services. She has also been a consultant on nursing projects in Israel, China, the Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, Hungary, Poland and the United States. 

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 In the year 2000, we were asking what would Nightingale have done with a fax machine? Now we are asking, what would she have done with YouTube and Social Media? 

Deva-Marie Beck is a Nightingale scholar, multi-media specialist, nursing educator, author, presenter and world-wide traveler, serving — in all these roles — as International Co-Director of NIGH.

        As NIGH’s executive coordinator and website developer, Dr. Beck is a multi-media communications strategist currently focused on the mobilization of public opinion and advocacy to increase concern for global health issues.  In these roles, she develops online feature articles, videos and photo-essays — coordinating with nurses, midwives, students and media professionals alike.  
        She is now aiming to empower and engage nurses, midwives and related students across the world to share their stories and their concerns with everybody else. Championing this ideas, Dr. Beck is developing — with NIGH's growing grassroots-to-global team — a participatory worldwide wave of media about how health and all  the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals are achieved. Mobilizing public opinion to care is a critical factor in achieving a better world.

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        Hannah Bergbower is a Nurse Educator and US Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania with 'Seed Global Health.' In this video clip, Hannah shares one of her many stories about learning how a culture — other than her own — is so compelling!  As she learned of their suffering, she became certain that she could do something to help her students to make their difference.  
        Hannah's stories were chosen to be told at NIGH's Parallel Event during the 2017 UN Commission on the Status of Women because maternal and infant health is at the core of all the issues women and girls face.

 I realized very quickly - that in their hospitals - they have a shelf because, unfortunately, the neonatal mortality rate is so high that they have a place to put these babies.  ​