A Case Study of Two Emerging Nurse Leaders Specializing in Virtual Health during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic.

In the field of digital health research, nurse leaders have an opportunity to be integral to the design, implementation and evaluation of virtual care interventions. This case study details the experiences of two emerging nurse leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic in providing research and clinical leadership for a national virtual health trial. These nurse leaders trained and led a national team of 70 nurses across eight participating centres delivering the virtual care and remote monitoring intervention, using the normalization process theory. This case study presents a theoretically informed approach to training and leadership and discusses the experiences and lessons learned.

From reactive to proactive: developing a valid clinical ethics needs assessment survey to support ethics program strategic planning (part 1 of 2).

As ethics committees and programs become integrated into the "usual business" of healthcare organizations, they are likely to face the predicament of responding to greater demands for service and higher expectations, without an influx of additional resources. This situation demands that ethics committees and programs allocate their scarce resources (including their time, skills and funds) strategically, rather than lurching from one ad hoc request to another; finding ways to maximize the effectiveness, efficiency, impact and quality of ethics services is essential in today's competitive environment. How can Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs) begin the process of strategic priority-setting to ensure they are delivering services where and how they are most needed? This paper describes the creation of the Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey (CENAS) as a tool to understand interprofessional staff perceptions of the organization's ethical climate, challenging ethical issues and educational priorities. The CENAS was designed to support informed resource allocation and advocacy by HECs. By sharing our process of developing and validating this ethics needs assessment survey we hope to enable strategic priority-setting in other resource-strapped ethics programs, and to empower HECs to shift their focus to more proactive, quality-focused initiatives.

Implementing a clinical ethics needs assessment survey: results of a pilot study (part 2 of 2).

This paper details the implementation of the Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey (CENAS) through a pilot study in five units within Hamilton Health Sciences. We describe how these pilot sites were selected, how we implemented the survey, the significant results and our interpretation of the findings. The primary goal of this paper is to share our experiences using this tool, specifically the challenges we encountered conducting a staff ethics needs assessment across different units in a large teaching hospital, and the facilitators to our success. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations of this study, our plans for using the results to develop a proactive ethics education strategy, and suggestions for other organizations wishing to adapt the CENAS to assess their staff ethics needs. Our secondary goal is to advance the "quality agenda" for ethics programs by demonstrating how a tool like the CENAS can be used to design more effective educational interventions, and to support strategic planning and proactive priority-setting for ethics programs.