Dr. Maria W. O'Rourke gives keynote address at TRG Conferences' Nursing Leadership 2025 event

What does it mean to be a nurse leader today? According to Dr. Maria W. O’Rourke, co-founder of the O'Rourke Institute, it means understanding the full scope of your professional authority and using it to shape the future of healthcare. In her keynote address at the annual TRG Conference on Nursing Leadership, Dr. O’Rourke invites nurses to reflect on the power they already possess and challenges them to act on it with clarity, purpose, and professional conviction that professional nursing practice is a vital to the health and welfare of the public.

Grounded in the promise to "Do No Harm," nursing leadership is not limited to titles or functional roles. Rather, it is a responsibility embedded in the very nature of being a professional. As Dr. O’Rourke reminds us, every nurse is a leader because every nurse is accountable for the decisions they make. The question is not whether nurses have power, but whether they recognize it, and more importantly, whether they use it to drive the change patients and communities need.