Changed Perceptions: Lessons Learned Regarding Nurse's Postpandemic Concerns.

Through a unique set of timings, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of a nursing department was conducted with the staff nurses of a large medical center in late 2019 and again in 2022. The intent of the 2019 analysis was bifold, to obtain rich input from nursing staff to apprise the 2020 Nursing Strategic Plan and to inform the hospital-wide core councils and the nursing unit councils on focused project work identified as Weaknesses and Threats. When the pandemic hit, work on strategic planning was paused to manage the unparalleled impact that COVID-19 had on the organization. In 2022, nursing leadership realized they had an opportunity to repeat the SWOT analysis, not only to inform the 2023 Nursing Strategic Plan but also to determine whether the perceptions of staff nurses regarding the SWOT in the nursing department had changed postpandemic. A thematic analysis provided the structure to analyze the perceptions of nurses pre- and postpandemic. This article presents our reflections for nurse leaders to consider when addressing the positive (Strengths/Opportunities) and negative (Weaknesses/Threats) perceptions of nurses in a postpandemic health care environment.

Innovation in Nursing Leadership: A Skill That Can Be Learned.

Innovation and creativity are part of everyday life for the bedside nurse. Nursing clinicians continuously innovate and create to meet each patient's unique needs. However, policies, regulations, and drama can inhibit that creativity when clinicians move into management. Three nurse leaders discuss their journeys to bring innovation into their leadership practices through participation in a yearlong program, the "Executive Fellowship in Innovation Health Leadership."The authors share insights gained after they participated in a cohort of health care leaders who took part in this yearlong fellowship. Details of the fellowship program are discussed, along with the benefits of entering such a program. Three separate innovation projects are reviewed. In Iowa, an Assistant Vice President of Nursing led the restructure and development of a support role to remove unnecessary tasks from nurse managers. In California, a Director of Education, Practice, and Informatics took a personal journey to enhance her senior leadership skills. In Florida, a Chief Nursing Officer created a program designed to teach nurse leaders to be innovative in health care. Each author addresses the innovation model/methodologies that they applied in the execution of their individual projects.

Rapid association learning in the primate prefrontal cortex in the absence of behavioral reversals.

The PFC plays a central role in our ability to learn arbitrary rules, such as "green means go." Previous experiments from our laboratory have used conditional association learning to show that slow, gradual changes in PFC neural activity mirror monkeys' slow acquisition of associations. These previous experiments required monkeys to repeatedly reverse the cue-saccade associations, an ability known to be PFC-dependent. We aimed to test whether the relationship between PFC neural activity and behavior was due to the reversal requirement, so monkeys were trained to learn several new conditional cue-saccade associations without reversing them. Learning-related changes in PFC activity now appeared earlier and more suddenly in correspondence with similar changes in behavioral improvement. This suggests that learning of conditional associations is linked to PFC activity regardless of whether reversals are required. However, when previous learning does not need to be suppressed, PFC acquires associations more rapidly.