Exploring Nursing Roles: Nurse Lobbyists Nurses have many professional responsibilities. They can vary from being a patient advocate to continuing their education throughout their career. One interesting professional role nurses take on are being nurse lobbyists. Lobbyists are defined as formal groups of people who collectively work to influence government decisions relating to a particular issue or topic (“Lobby,” n.d.). Therefore, nurse lobbyists work together to influence the government on matters related to nursing or healthcare in general. Nurse lobbyists are not the kind of professional lobbyists that are compensated for their lobbying efforts, but rather communicate with the government based on their own ethical obligation to promote health and encourage wellness for citizens of our community.
Why Do Nurses Lobby Government? Some people may already lobby the government, but just do not realize it. If you have emailed, called, sent a letter to your congress member, the president, your governor, you are a lobbyist. Lobbying for nursing is similar to this experience, but perhaps more organized in that it is a whole group of professionals as opposed to a singular person.
Both individual and group lobbying are effective in communicating points of view and ideas to our government…show more content… By speaking in front of congress, signing petitions, sending emails, and writing on social media, nurses gather their voices together to be heard and hopefully have an impact on choices our officials make. According to Lumpkin (2007), “The public’s high regard for nurse’s ethics and honesty carries with it a responsibility to advocate for health laws, regulations, and policy that make high quality of health care services available to all Americans at a reasonable cost” (pg.