What national role will nurses play in the future? For Nursing School Dean Afaf Meleis and six experts, nurses may just be the key to providing the “health” in “healthcare reform.”

Yesterday afternoon in Claire M. Fagin Hall, Meleis introduced a panel discussion on healthcare reform in the public interest. The panel was moderated by Philadelphia Daily News senior writer Dave Davies and featured experts in the field of health care, including Penn bioethics professor Arthur Caplan, Penn Professor of Medicine Richard Cooper and Governor Rendell’s Senior Advisor on Health Care Rosemarie Greco.

Among the topics discussed were the disproportionate amount of illness in poor populations and the concept of health care as a human right.

President Obama lost his chance, according to Caplan, to reform health care rather than health insurance. Furthermore, by neglecting to address health care as a basic right, Obama gave healthcare reform opponents further ammunition for their cause.

Panelists also spoke about the emerging importance of nurses and nurse practitioners in providing primary health care. According to Cooper, continuing to assign the task of general health and illness prevention to physicians is like fighting “too many wars” with a “shrinking army of doctors.”

Cooper went on to say that trained doctors should keep to their fields of specialization and nurses, who are well trained for wellness care, should be granted expanded privileges to adequately deal with primary health care.

“We will never ever replace the autonomous authority of a nurse practitioner with regulation,” said Cooper to applause from the audience. “You can’t have a hundred bureaucrats standing over every nurse practitioner telling her what to do.”

Meleis emphasized the point of separating “health” care from “illness” care. She explained that health care focuses on the promotion and maintenance of health, while illness care is the medical treatment of disease.

“We hope that the nation will turn to solutions that are intrinsically and uniquely ‘nursing’ in their approach,” she said. “Solutions that don’t treat patients solely in the hospital or simply for one disease, but rather, solutions that treat patients across a continuum of settings, across their lifespan.”

The panel concluded with Meleis’ thanks to the panel and a reminder that “without nursing, we ain’t gonna have healthcare reform."