Attendees of the 2025 MDAC Virtual Leadership Summit explored nurse leadership and innovative actions being taken to ensure value and excellence in collaborative nursing education and practice.
At a time when health care systems face growing strain, the Maryland Action Coalition’s (MDAC) Virtual Leadership Summit — hosted by the University of Maryland School of Nursing on June 9 —delivered a clear message: Nurses are essential drivers of innovation and equity. National leaders called for a bold reimagining of nursing’s role, from economic engine to policy force to front-line changemaker.
MDAC is part of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a nationwide movement to improve health care through nursing and an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The campaign includes action coalitions in 50 states and the District of Columbia working to implement the National Academy of Medicine’s “Future of Nursing 2020 – 2030” recommendations.
“This summit is more than an event,” Yolanda Ogbolu, PhD ’11, MS ’05, BSN ’04, NNP, FNAP, FAAN, the Bill and Joanne Conway Dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing and professor, said as she welcomed summit attendees. “I look forward to it every year because it’s a call to action. It’s a call for us to reimagine how we educate, how we support, and how we empower nurses across the state to lead in every corner of our health care and educational systems.”
Rebecca Love, MSN, RN, BS, FIEL, President Emerita of the Society of Nurse Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs & Leaders, a nonprofit global organization committed to empowering nurses to create innovative solutions to transform health care, delivered a passionate keynote address, “Nurse Innovation that Transformed Our Past, Present, and Future.”
Love highlighted Florence Nightingale’s impact on the nursing profession, nursing’s role in the women’s suffrage movement, policy barriers that prevent equality for nurses in the United States, the need to have nursing classified as a STEM profession, the role of nurses in health care innovation, and today’s critical nursing shortage.
“Where would we be without nursing?” Love asked.