It is no coincidence that in setting the agenda for primary health care (PHC), it was acknowledged that nurses would have to play a major role in helping to shift the health system away from a predominant focus on illness and cure, toward increased attention to health promotion and disease prevention. The goal in primary health care is to ‘protect and promote the health of all people of the world’ where health is defined in a positive sense as well-being, not merely as absence of illness. Health so defined has always been the concern of nurses.

In this paper, the relationship between modern professional nursing and PHC will be discussed. The notion that advancing the primary health care agenda is inherently within the domain of nursing practice will be developed, citing examples from a PHC project that involved nurses working with family physicians in a primary care practice. The position will be taken that primary health care provides an opportunity to revitalize the nursing workforce, by recapturing the vision of early nursing leaders, such as Florence Nightingale, who recognized the need for social reform in improving population health and understood nurses’ role in achieving that.