Advancing Professional Governance to Improve Health Outcomes.

Developing the skills and behaviors needed for nurses to lead in professional governance has long been a priority at the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL). The annual AONL Professional Governance Leadership Conference is an important part of advancing nursing professional governance, convening nurses in all roles to discuss professional governance concepts and leadership practices. AONL has produced publications and podcasts exploring the professional governance foundations, roles, and behaviors, available on its website.

Improving 9.5 Million Lives: Pilot Testing Ambulatory Care Nurse-Sensitive Quality Indicators.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate scientific acceptability, feasibility, utility, and value of ambulatory care nurse-sensitive quality indicators (ACNSIs) in military outpatient clinics.

Background: Optimizing healthcare quality and cost requires scientifically sound metrics. However, ACNSI development and measurement have lagged behind inpatient nurse-sensitive indicators.

Ambulatory Care Nurse-Sensitive Indicators: A Scoping Review of the Literature 2006-2021.

Background/purpose: Meeting recommendations that nurses should partner in leading health care change is hampered by the lack of ambulatory care nurse-sensitive indicators (ACNSIs). This scoping review was conducted to identify evidence regarding ACNSI identification, development, implementation, and benchmarking.

Methods: Following the PRISMA-ScR reporting guide, we performed PubMed/MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library searches for the period January 2006 to March 2021.

Preparing Nurse Leaders for Value-Based Care: A Toolkit to Guide Practice Transformation.

Organizations across the country are redesigning care delivery to improve quality and outcomes, enhance the patient experience, reduce costs, and, ultimately, produce better population health. Leaders from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership engaged key stakeholders to discuss the role nursing can play and the toolkit that will be introduced this year to guide nurse leaders in striving for value.

Leveraging Professional Governance During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Dynamic nursing leadership and engagement of nursing at all levels are critical to effective care delivery. During the COVID-19 crisis, many organizations suspended non-COVID-related meetings, including professional governance councils where practice decisions are made. This article highlights how shared or professional governance was leveraged during this global pandemic at a large academic medical center and community hospital effectively sustaining autonomous nursing practice while responding to a rapidly changing environment and impacting quality patient care.

Ambulatory Care Nurse-Sensitive Indicators Series: Starting with Low-Hanging Fruit: Proposing the Adaptation Of Health Care Measures to the Role of the Nurse in Ambulatory Care.

The American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing's Nurse-Sensitive Indicator Task Force was charged with identifying and developing meaningful measures for the ambulatory care environment. Several strategies were used to identify measures that would reflect the value of the role of the nurse in this setting. One such strategy was to conduct a comprehensive review of the health care environment as a whole and the measures within it, to identify measures that already existed that could easily be adapted to the role of the nurse in ambulatory care settings.

Ambulatory Care Nurse-Sensitive Indicators Series: Capturing the Role of Nursing in Ambulatory Care--The Case for Meaningful Nurse-Sensitive Measurement.

The nation has been on a quest to advance quality in providing health care services and improving patient outcomes. The challenge has been to identify and define metrics that will demonstrate improvement. Acute care settings have a fairly well-established system of quality measurement, but ambulatory care systems are in less-developed stages.

Nursing-Sensitive Indicators in Ambulatory Care.

Ambulatory nursing care can be difficult to comprehend in all its complexity. In August 2013, the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing commissioned a task force to identify nursing-sensitive indicators specific to ambulatory care settings. Given the great variation in settings, staff mix, patient populations, role dimensions, skill sets, documentation systems, and resources, determining metrics that apply across the entire continuum of care is a daunting task.

Philanthropy as a source of funding for nursing initiatives.

Nurse leaders are challenged with ensuring that research and evidence-based practices are being integrated into clinical care. Initiatives such as the Magnet Recognition Program have helped reinforce the importance of advancing nursing practices to integrate best practices, conduct quality improvement initiatives, improve performance metrics, and involve bedside nurses in conducting research and evidence-based practice projects. While seeking research funding is an option for some initiatives, other strategies such as seeking funding from grateful patients or from philanthropic resources are becoming important options for nurse leaders to pursue, as the availability of funding from traditional sources such as professional organizations or federal funding becomes more limited.