A second State of the World’s Nursing (SOWN) report will be launched next month, promising to give an ‘accurate view’ of the global nursing workforce, it has been confirmed.
The report from the World Health Organization (WHO) will be launched on International Nurses Day (IND) on May 12 2025 – which is also Florence Nightingale’s birthday.
It will follow from the first SOWN report from 2020 which revealed a global shortfall of just under six million nurses.
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The upcoming report is expected to provide an update on this figure and comes as countries across the globe are still recovering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and from climate-linked environmental catastrophes and associated healthcare challenges.
The WHO said the blueprint would ‘present the most contemporary evidence on the global nursing workforce, including education, employment, migration, regulation, working conditions, leadership and more’.
Its findings are intended to support ‘national level policy dialogue and decision-making on where and how to invest in nursing to strengthen primary healthcare systems toward universal health coverage’, the WHO added.
The International Council of Nurses (ICN) has worked in collaboration with the WHO on the creation of the SOWN report.
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Speaking at an ICN webinar on Wednesday, Dr Pamela Cipriano, president of the ICN, said the 2025 report would reveal how the international nursing workforce has changed in the last five years, with a focus on employment, migration and attrition.
‘We must address the work environment, we must address pay, we must address all of the issues that support a well-functioning healthcare environment, healthcare team, and certainly nurses and midwives,’ Dr Cipriano told attendees.
Dr Cipriano was speaking at a webinar focused on a new ICN report which warned global nursing workforce is ‘in the midst of an unprecedented crisis’ that risks patient and staff safety.
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In its report published ahead of International Nurses Day, the ICN described how chronic understaffing, unsafe working conditions and insufficient pay is undermining nurses’ wellbeing and ability to provide quality care across the world.
This year’s International Nurses Day theme, set by the ICN, is focused on how ‘caring for nurses strengthens economies’.
