Judith Shamian
Judith Shamian is the president of the International Council of Nurses (ICN). She was elected to the position at ICN’s May 2013 quadrennial congress in Melbourne, Australia. The term of the presidency is 2013-2017.
Dr. Shamian is also the former president and CEO of the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) and past president of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA). She is also a professor at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto, a co-investigator with the Nursing Health Services Research Unit, and was the Executive Director of the Canadian federal government’s Office of Nursing Policy for five years. In addition to her extensive international work, she was vice president of Nursing at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto for 10 years and has held various academic positions since 1989.
Dr. Shamian has published and spoken extensively nationally and internationally on a wide range of topics. Government departments and agencies and academic bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), often call on her to speak and consult on many issues surrounding nursing, health human resources, leadership, and health-care policy.
Dr. Shamian's campaign to become ICN president focused on uniting nursing, health-care and other groups to ensure nurses are able to turn their “expertise, experience and credibility into tangible policy action on the ground for the benefit of humanity.” She said her “top priority as ICN president would be supporting outreach activities that multiply opportunities for nurses to connect, building mutual understanding and trust."
Dr. Shamian's “vision” for ICN is to maximize the organization’s ability to empower nurses and nursing organizations to influence nursing and health agendas globally. She has a three-point plan to achieve this:
Dr. Shamian has worked extensively with national and international partners to strengthen health policy.
In the 1980s, she worked in Botswana on an International Development Research Centre-funded research project – the first nursing research project in the country. The University of Botswana now has numerous PhD-prepared faculty members and offers graduate education. Later, she established the first World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Leadership Development in a hospital environment, which brought together nurse executives from the Caribbean, Israel, Eastern Europe and Africa to learn more about their role in leading a facility’s nursing services.
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