Including a historical lens in The National Institute for Nursing Research Strategic Plan

The current draft of the National Institute for Nursing Research's (NINR) strategic framework provides an important template to guide inquiry into critical issues within the discipline's domain. We strongly support its attention to innovation; advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion; contextualized approaches that address systemic and structural racism; and studies that examine the social determinants of health. We also support its concept of “research lenses” to capture the multiplicity of rich and varied methods that will help the discipline achieve its scholarly, practice, and policy goals. As the respective directors of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at the University of Virginia, and the Midwest Nursing History Research Center at the University of Illinois Chicago we firmly believe that if NINR is to meet its ambitious goals it must include historical studies or “lenses” among those it will support.