A service improvement project of a legacy nurse programme to improve the retention of late career nurses.

Background: A Nottingham Legacy Nurse Programme was developed in response to the reducing supply of new nursing registrants and an ageing workforce. The programme comprised components of focussed mentorship, knowledge transition, support and development of new learners in practice. Aims: The work-based development programme aimed to improve the retention and experience of late career registered nurses. Methods: The programme was informed by the evidence base and co-produced with late career registered nurses (aged 55 years or over, approaching retirement). A small pilot programme (n = 6) was evaluated through a mixed-methods approach. Refinements and recommendations were proposed in response to findings of a scoping search of the literature, feedback from participants and stakeholder groups across the NHS Midlands and East regions (n = 238). Results: A Legacy Nurse programme has potential to address nurses' individual career development needs, valuing and retaining them in the workforce, enabling them to share professional knowledge and skills within clinical teams and offers a cost-effective solution to improving retention of late career nurses. Conclusions: Addressing the needs of late career registered nurses is required to improve retention, job satisfaction, quality-of-care provision and facilitate knowledge transfer. The programme requires evaluation in other care settings and should be considered as part of an integrated approach to nurse retention, inclusive talent management and workforce planning, alongside financial and careers advice.

Increasing student involvement in a trust.

Effective partnership between universities and placement providers is an essential part of high-quality pre-registration nurse education. This article reports on work at one trust to build on working relationships with higher education colleagues; this included the establishment of a student task group to improve practice learning, communication and student involvement at the trust.

Applying talent management to nursing.

To deliver the chief nursing officer for England's vision for compassionate care and embed the 6Cs effectively, the NHS must attract, develop and retain talented nurses with a diverse range of skills. This is particularly important given the predicted shortage of nurses and evidence that NHS providers need to increase skill mix ratios to deliver safe patient care. "Talent management" is increasingly discussed within the health service; we recently asked nurses and student nurses to identify their priorities for talent development. They highlighted the importance of strong ward leadership, effective personal appraisal, clearer career pathways, increased staff engagement and involvement in decision making, as well as a need for greater emphasis on the recognition and reward of nursing achievements. We concluded that these factors are crucial to attracting, retaining and developing talent in nursing. Nurse leaders can learn approaches to developing talent from business and wider healthcare settings.

Staff and patient involvement in benchmarking to improve care.

This article outlines work undertaken to relaunch Essence of Care benchmarking at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), a 1,665-bed teaching hospital based on two sites. The eight high impact actions for nurses and midwives (NHS Institute 2009) have been aligned with Essence of Care to develop comprehensive tools for quality improvement at local level. This has resulted in increased patient feedback and enhanced staff ownership and involvement in quality-improvement processes and raising standards of care. As a national pilot site for the Productive Ward programme (NHS Institute 2007), NUH has developed links between the two initiatives, reviewing ward processes, increasing direct patient feedback and providing a wealth of data relating to quality of care and patient-safety issues.