Paper
Thursday, 20 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Models for Nurses' Work Environment
Ensuring a Competent Nursing Workforce: A State-Wide Collaboration Between Service and Academic Leaders
Susan R. Santos Lacey, PhD, RN, School of Nursing; Lister Hill Scholar; COERE Senior Scientist, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA and Wanda M. Jones, MSN, RN, Mississippi Office of Nursing Workforce, Jackson, MS, USA.
Learning Objective #1: identify generalist competencies necessary for today's complex healthcare setting defined by nursing leaders in service and academic settings.
Learning Objective #2: describe the state-wide partnership between service and academic leaders to provide quality care by increasing competencies for nursing professionals.
  Today’s inpatient healthcare setting is complex and requires the nursing workforce to be able to provide care at a much higher level than required in the past. It is critical that programs of nursing and service settings set common competency goals for nursing graduates to meet the needs of patients today and in the future. One hundred eighty three academic leaders and faculty and 154 service leaders across Mississippi participated in a study using a standardized nurse competency tool. Significant results indicated incongruence between these two groups for the competencies of time management and team work. Service leaders ranked these as the top two of 20 competencies needed for new nurses while academics ranked these 8th and 9th respectively. A task force of both service and academic leaders was formed to find solutions to this problem. They determined the most efficient way to address time management and team work deficits was to increase the numbers of students who participated in an optional residency program across the state from the current rate of 18% to 100% of all nursing school students by the year 2010. This session will provide specifics about the process, how impediments were removed, and the current status of implementation. The underlying tenet guiding this work was to prepare nurses to provide the best quality care through a tangible and sustainable alliance between service and academic settings; a critical imperative for the future of nursing and patient care. Efforts are underway to link this implementation to other benchmarks of success such as nurse retention, satisfaction for employees and employers as well as patient outcomes.

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See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)