Nursing and gerontology

This article, originally prepared as a think piece for The John A. Hartford Foundation, explores the interrelationship between nursing and gerontology: strengths nursing brings to the area of aging; challenges that must be addressed both at the societal level and within the profession for nursing to achieve its full potential in gerontology; and strategies that might be adopted to maximize strengths and address identified gaps. These strategies include high-lighting the heroic behaviors of the gerontologic nurse, increasing support for gerontologic advanced practice nursing, promoting collaborative gerontologic research, encouraging dissemination of nursing's knowledge base, and collaborating with foundations to promote self-care. It is proposed that nursing's research-practice agenda in the third millennium must be: preventing disease where possible; minimizing morbidity and maximizing quality of life when disease cannot be prevented, and having the wisdom to reconcile the two.