Nursing Leadership Across the Continuum: The Nurse Leader in Industry.

Nurse leaders are increasingly called upon to provide their experience, expertise, and unique perspectives in nontraditional settings including in industry. Technology, software development, analytics, insurance, government, nurse entrepreneurs in business, consulting, and pharma are a few of the types of industries more frequently utilizing nurse leaders to inform, grow, govern, and operate their businesses. While the settings and skills may be different, the leadership competencies articulated through the American Nurses Association Nursing Administration Scope and Standards of Practice and the American Organization for Nursing Leadership Nurse Executive Competencies are still very much aligned and important to industry nurse leaders. This article articulates those commonalities and contrasts.

Outcomes-Based Nurse Staffing During Times of Crisis and Beyond.

Nurse staffing is linked to safety, quality, and experience outcomes. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, staffing has become more critical as overwhelming demand has met diminishing supply of healthy nurses, capacity for care, and the innovation necessary to deliver optimal quality and experience to patients and the people who care for them. Press Ganey data scientists, along with industry experts, sought to evaluate staffing before the pandemic and its effects on clinical quality, experience, and nurse engagement. Furthermore, interviews with expert nurse researchers and nursing leaders helped to identify the kind of innovation necessary to accommodate the variable demand in patient volumes, acuity, nurse availability, and teamwork. Valuable insights from this work will help healthcare leaders in their quest to optimize nursing care.

The Impact of Compassionate Connected Care on Safety, Quality, and Experience in the Age of COVID-19.

Compassionate Connected Care improves safety, quality, and experience of care. In the age of COVID-19, it is even more critical. The care model and strategies to deliver it are underpinned by quantitative and qualitative data and provide a roadmap for caregivers during this unprecedented crisis.

The Impact of Nurse Engagement on Quality, Safety, and the Experience of Care: What Nurse Leaders Should Know.

To lead others in achieving exemplary outcomes, nurse leaders need to understand the vital and interdependent connection between quality, safety, the patient and RN experience of care, and RN engagement. The triple aim of improving population health, enhancing patient experience, and reducing cost cannot be accomplished without a robust and engaged workforce that finds joy and meaning in its work. This is especially true for the nursing workforce. The vital connection of nurse engagement to the experience of care, and ultimately to nurse and patient outcomes, is clear. Quality improvement efforts that equally emphasize initiatives to improve patient experience and create and sustain a highly engaged nursing workforce are key to achieving desired outcomes.

Nurse Engagement: What are the Contributing Factors for Success?

The concept of nurse engagement is often used to describe nurses' commitment to and satisfaction with their jobs. In reality, these are just two facets of engagement. Additional considerations include nurses' level of commitment to the organization that employs them, and their commitment to the nursing profession itself. Because nurse engagement correlates directly with critical safety, quality, and patient experience outcomes, understanding the current state of nurse engagement and its drivers must be a strategic imperative. This article will discuss the current state of nurse engagement, including variables that impact engagement. We also briefly describe the potential impact of compassion fatigue and burnout, and ways to offer compassionate connected care for the caregiver. Such insight is integral to the profession's sustainability under the weight of demographic, economic, and technological pressures being felt across the industry, and is also fundamental to the success of strategies to improve healthcare delivery outcomes across the continuum of care.

Reducing patient suffering through compassionate connected care.

Patient experience continues to play an increasingly critical role in quality outcomes and reimbursement. Nurse executives are tasked with helping direct-care nurses connect with patients to improve care experiences. Connecting with patients in compassionate ways to alleviate inherent patient suffering and prevent avoidable suffering is key to improving the patient experience. The Compassionate Connected Care framework identifies strategies for meeting the challenges of connecting with patients and reducing suffering. Methods integrate clinical, operational, cultural, and behavioral aspects of care to target patient needs based on condition. Caregivers learn to better express empathy and compassion to patients, and nurse leaders are better equipped to engage nurses at the bedside.

Improving the patient experience: real-world strategies for engaging nurses.

Patients spend more time with nurses during an admission than with any other profession in the hospital. Nurses and their interactions with patients are central to shaping and improving the patient's experience. Patient experience, as measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey, drives 30% of value-based purchasing (VBP) scores and incentive payments, as prescribed under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Hospital performance on the communication with nurses' domain within HCAHPS predicts performance on several other domains. In addition, nurses at the bedside have significantly lower engagement scores than nurses who are not involved in direct patient care. Considering the relationship between nurse engagement and patient experience and the relationship between patient experience and hospital success under VBP, pursuing strategies and tactics that will foster and sustain nurse engagement is critical for nurse executives.

Managing variability in perioperative services.

Variability within perioperative services has come to be something physicians, perioperative nurses, and managers expect. Peaks and valleys in schedules; differences in physician preferences for surgical implants, instruments, and supplies; staffing competencies; and inpatient bed availability are just a few examples of day-to-day variability that affects perioperative services personnel. Rather than simply responding to variability, however, the goal should be to eliminate variability in patient flow as much as possible and effectively manage what cannot be eliminated. Combining the hard science of queuing theory and simulation modeling with the soft science of change management and operations improvement expertise is the key to success, and a collaborative team makes it possible.

Can't we all just get along? Know your role in fostering hospital-provider collaboration.

When nurses and physicians, both staff and management, work together toward mutually acceptable and productive goals, the patient and the institution prosper.