As the largest healthcare profession and the one most trusted by the public in the annual Gallup survey, nurses have the power to improve the health of communities throughout the country by bringing their expertise into the boardroom. However, we are an absent voice in so many of those boardrooms.

Regina Cunningham, PhD, RN, NEABC, FAAN, has been appointed chief executive officer (CEO) of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) in Philadelphia. Cunningham is the first nurse, oncology-specific or otherwise, to hold the position since the institution’s inception in 1874. She begins her tenure as CEO for HUP in April 2017.

As 2017 begins, ONS is hard at work supporting several new policies that could shape health care in the coming months and years. Although the election season has ended, ONS’s ongoing advocacy for oncology nurses and patients with cancer continues.

In an article in the July 2016 issue of the Oncology Nursing Forum, researchers set out to study the experience of women specifically with estrogen receptor- (ER-) positive breast cancer and what they felt helped or hindered their survivorship experience.

In an ornate U.S. Senate hearing room, ONS, with coalition partners, Once Voice Against Cancer (OVAC) and the National Coalition for Cancer Research (NCCR), held a congressional briefing called “National Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel Report Panel Discussion.”

There are three important issues that I’m following in this election year. The first is what political candidates—including in gubernatorial races—propose for continuing to improve healthcare coverage for people in the United States. Nurses need to hold electoral candidates and public officials accountable. If a presidential candidate promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, we should be asking, “What will you replace it with?” At the state level, not all states adopted Medicaid expansion, but now some governors and gubernatorial candidates of states that did not opt into the expansion are considering it.

Ask any oncology nurse leader and nearly all will tell you: they didn’t get to where they are without learning a few things along the way. Leadership is a process, building the future while learning from the past.