Advanced Perioperative Nurse Specialist Sarah Oluwasola delivered a powerful keynote at the Osun State Nursing Conference. The conference, held on September 6, 2025, challenging nurses across Nigeria and Africa to embrace their roles as innovators, entrepreneurs, and reformers within healthcare.
Sarah Oluwasola is an Advanced Perioperative Nurse Specialist at Evercare Hospital Lekki, founder of LinkedIn Nurses, and co-founder of LeveragePad Consulting. With over six years of clinical practice, she is a certified confidence coach, public speaker, and personal brand strategist with a growing influence of over 55,000 LinkedIn followers. She is passionate about advancing nursing leadership, innovation, and policy reform across Africa.
Her message drew inspiration from a landmark presentation by Rebecca Love, a global nursing leader, whose talk at Northeastern University (featured on Johnson & Johnson Nursing’s YouTube platform) spotlighted nurse-led innovation and entrepreneurship. Sarah contextualized those insights for Nigerian and African nursing, demonstrating their urgent relevance within local healthcare realities.
In her keynote, she reframed the future of nursing through four key pillars:
1. Change the Conversation — Shifting from “I’m just a nurse” to “I am a nurse,” reclaiming confidence, presence, and recognition of nurses’ contributions to healthcare.
2. Embrace Innovation as a Mindset — Highlighting research that shows nurses perform an average of 27 work-arounds per shift, proving that innovation is already embedded in nursing practice.
3. Learn the Business of Healthcare — Urging nurses to develop competence in strategy, finance, operations, and entrepreneurship in order to influence high-level decisions.
4. Challenge the Status Quo — Calling for courage to push for policy reforms, career progression, and structures that allow nurse-led solutions to thrive.
Her message resonated deeply with attendees, with feedback describing the keynote as “inspiring,” “self-explanatory,” and “a timely challenge for the future of nursing leadership.” Several senior nursing representatives expressed interest in inviting Sarah to recreate the lecture for an upcoming seminar for Senior nursing leaders of the state.
Speaking after the event, Sarah emphasized: “Nurses are not only caregivers – we are natural innovators. Twenty-seven times a day, we create solutions to keep care moving forward. The task now is to celebrate, structure, and scale those solutions into sustainable reforms.”
The keynote underscores the urgency for Nigeria and Africa’s nursing community to leverage nurses’ lived experience, innovative capacity, and leadership potential in shaping healthcare systems.
