Maelstrom of change: Back to the future
This past month, two very important reports were disseminated, both of which demand the attention of nurse leaders. The Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation1 and the results of a Gallup Poll, Nursing Leadership from Bedside to Boardroom, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,2 present provocative data about nurses and how and what we think we prepare them to do. The findings provide much food for thought.
Here are just some questions we must ask ourselves as we move forward:
- Do all members of the professoriate in nursing have the commitment to change? To engage themselves in the work of changing undergraduate education?
- What financial forecasting models are needed to determine the cost of preparing faculty for these new roles and pedagogies?
- How do we predict and then accommodate changes in the numbers of students that can educated using new models?
- How receptive will healthcare systems be to these new models, to embedding faculty into their leadership structures, and what can they offer in terms of support?
1. Benner P, Sutphen M, Leonard V, Day L. Educating nurses: a call for radical transformation. San Francisco (CA): Jossey-Bass; 2010.
2. Gallup, Inc. Nursing leadership from bedside to boardroom: opinion leaders’ perceptions. [Submitted to] The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, January 20, 2010.
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about 10 years ago
This is a VERY important topic and I want to thank you for putting it out there for discussion. All of the questions that you posed were good and we will need to get a grasp on them as we move forward. There are, however, other areas that will need to be addressed.
I think we need to pay attention to the politics of health care reform. This new law has opened up the possibility for massive expansion of nursing roles and responsibilities – but those opportunities will disappear if nurses and nursing faculty do not stay on task to move the change in ways that benefit our profession. We need to be sure that the law as well as the policies and funding opportunities that come out of the law include nursing considerations.
This means that we need to address the long-standing nursing problems related to the shortage and underfunding of nursing faculty; the limitations on undergraduate, graduate, and NP class size, directly related to shortages of faculty and clinical practice space; and the expansion of nursing roles in health care. I would love to see NP-prepared nurses named as the preferred providers of primary care. I would also love to see demands for out-patient clinical care sites to hire RNs to help establish medical home structures, to provide much-needed patient education, and to work on helping people adhere to their medications, treatments, and clinic schedules.
about 10 years ago
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