Designing Tomorrow: Bringing Our Own Chair… Leading the Conversations.

A highly visible transition occurred earlier this year with the retirement of Pam Thompson, MS, RN, CENP, FAAN, from her role as CEO of the American Organization of Nurse Executives. Ms Thompson was always an advocate of promoting the voice of nursing. This month, the spotlight will shine on a team of nurse leaders who found their voice, got involved, and led the conversation.

CNOs Gearing Up While Many are Winding Down: The Late Career DNP.

Nurses are knowledge workers. The evidence that informs our practice is ever changing, and we recognize that one of the obligations of knowledge work is lifelong learning. There is a newly emerging phenomenon occurring in our profession--one that we did not see a decade ago.

Transitioning to Excellence in Nurse Staffing: A Statewide Initiative to Leverage the Evidence.

Successful transitions require leadership, focus, and tenacity. Substantive change rarely comes easily. Leaders are frequently challenged to determine when change is needed and how to best accomplish it.

Designing Tomorrow: Rewriting the Nurse Executive Script for an Emerging Stage.

As nurse executives (NEs), we are aware of our emerging, expanding roles as single settings, whether hospitals, clinics, or other entities, are morphing into components of whole systems. We are challenged to focus appropriate attention inward to ensure that nursing is positioned to lead while extending ourselves outward, to participate in shaping new systems. This month, we will shine the spotlight on these transitions, identifying some of the triumphs and challenges, in a conversation with Donna King, an NE with Advocate Health Care in Illinois.

Designing tomorrow when the sun sets on today.

The author of this column relates her experience as she discusses transitions, dilemmas, and opportunities for nurse executives as we meet new professional and personal challenges.

Designing tomorrow: transitioning from participation to governance.

Nurse executives are challenged with seemingly endless transitions, fueled by healthcare transformation that regularly exposes us to new risks and opportunities. Structures are being redesigned in pursuit of a vision of population health. Roles are evolving to accommodate management structures that extend far beyond traditional walls and disciplines.

Designing tomorrow from the other side of the bed.

The author poses insights about transitions in the development of collaborative relationships between medical students and nurses.

Healthcare reform: unprecedented opportunity, unparalleled risk.

This department column is devoted to posing insights about transitions through, to and from, administrative roles in nursing. The unprecedented challenges posed by healthcare reform present new and complex challenges for nurse executives. The author discusses transitions in thinking and approach that will be needed to respond to the challenges and keep the focus on nursing practice excellence and patient outcomes.

Designing tomorrow: creative and effective succession planning.

This department column is devoted to posing thought-provoking insights about transitions through, to, and from administrative roles in nursing. In this article, I explore an effective approach to succession planning for the role of director of surgical services, implemented in my role as chief nursing officer for a tertiary, acute care hospital. The plan provided a creative solution to the succession challenge and important lessons learned.

Celebrating yesterday, designing tomorrow.

This is a new department column for JONA. It will be devoted to posing thought-provoking insights about transitions through, to and from, administrative roles in nursing.

Shaping future nurse leaders through shared governance.

The progression of five professional nurses from shared governance council chairs to unit director positions and the progression of three nurses from shared governance council chairs to clinical nurse specialist roles in an 18-year period provide compelling evidence of the impact shared governance has provided in the development of future nurse leaders in our organization. The collective wisdom of those who have lived this experience suggests that the opportunities inherent in these clinical nurse leadership roles make this a logical progression, including getting noticed and nudged, developing an understanding of the big picture, developing a results orientation, and substantial skill acquisition.

On the scene: St Mary's Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin.

In this article, we discuss Shared Governance as the foundation of our nursing professional practice model. Through the use of case examples and reflections from our management team, we demonstrate how this accountability-based practice model promotes excellence through developing, connecting, and engaging people, clarifying and communicating goals, using data to make decisions, and even shaping our organizational response to a critical incident. We close with a look to our future as our hospital embraces whole-system shared decision making.

A critical competency: determining and communicating the number of nurses you must hire.

Nurse leaders must understand and articulate critical concepts of budgeting and staffing to provide credible leadership to our nursing organizations. Determining the ideal number of nurses to hire on any given unit is as much an art as it is a science. Understanding the relationship between hiring requirements and the budget can lead your nursing organization to achieve important results for your hospital.

Quantifying patient care intensity: an evidence-based approach to determining staffing requirements.

Over the course of the past decade, the intensity of patient care requirements has increased because of an aging patient population with increasingly complex care requirements and declining length of stay. At the same time, the reimbursement pressure in hospitals continues. The nursing organization of St.