About Us

The Center to Champion Nursing in America is an initiative of AARP, the AARP Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Center, a consumer-driven, national force for change, works to increase the nation’s capacity to educate and retain nurses who are prepared and empowered to positively impact health care access, quality, and costs.

Center Overview (PDF)

Fact Sheet (PDF)

Our Mission

To ensure all Americans have access to a highly-skilled nurse, when and where they need one. 

Our Goals

To build and sustain a 21st century nursing workforce with the skills and knowledge Americans need, the Center is working to:

• Strengthen our nation’s educational pathways to prepare the nursing workforce of the future.
• Increase the number and diversity of nurses entering and remaining in the profession.
• Remove barriers that limit nurses’ ability to provide the health care consumers need.
• Enhance the influence of nurses in high levels of health care, policy, business and community decision making.
   

Our Approach

The Center uses multiple strategies to create positive change. These include:
 

• Building coalitions. The Center convenes multi-disciplinary health care, business and consumer coalitions. At the national level, the Champion Nursing Coalition represents the voices of consumers, purchasers and providers of health care to support solutions to the nursing shortage. Its purpose is to raise awareness about nurses’ roles in health care reform and achieve permanent solutions to the looming crisis of inadequate numbers of nurses with the right skills. The Center also convenes the Champion Nursing Council, an advisory group comprised of national nursing organizations.
• Hosting national summits and forums. The Center collaborated with Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) on two national forums on the role of nursing in health care reform and related workforce development issues. The Center also collaborated with RWJF, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Division of Nursing at the Health Resources and Services Administration of HHS to design and implement two national summits on increasing nursing education capacity.
• Providing ongoing technical assistance that supports state/grassroots efforts. The Center is providing continuing technical assistance to multi-stakeholder teams in 30 states, all working to increase education capacity. The Center is building and implementing public education and advocacy initiatives at AARP state offices nationwide and is providing advocacy training, communications support and assistance to stakeholders to help them communicate more effectively with policy-makers and private-sector leaders.
• Developing a clearinghouse. The Center is working in partnership with the Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers to develop and implement a minimum data set for on-going measurement on nurse supply, demand, and pipeline indicators. Gathering this information, along with other workforce-related research, will help drive action and provide a Web-based information clearinghouse for public reference.
• Acting as an information resource on health care reform. The Center is collaborating with AARP to raise awareness of the roles of nurses in increasing access to primary care, transition care and chronic care management in a reformed health care delivery system.