Developing leadership practices in hospital-based nurse educators in an online learning community.

Hospital-based nurse educators are in a prime position to mentor future nurse leaders; however, they need to first develop their own leadership practices. The goal was to establish a learning community where hospital-based nurse educators could develop their own nursing leadership practices within an online environment that included teaching, cognitive, and social presence. Using a pretest/posttest-only nonexperimental design, 35 nurse educators from three Canadian provinces engaged in a 12-week online learning community via a wiki where they learned about exemplary leadership practices and then shared stories about their own leadership practices. Nurse educators significantly increased their own perceived leadership practices after participation in the online community, and teaching, cognitive, and social presence was determined to be present in the online community. It was concluded that leadership development can be enhanced in an online learning community using a structured curriculum, multimedia presentations, and the sharing and analysis of leadership stories. Educators who participated should now be better equipped to role model exemplary leadership practices and mentor our nurse leaders of the future.

Determining the weighting and relative importance of CanMEDS roles and competencies.

BACKGROUND: The CanMEDS roles and competencies are being used as the framework to support the development of the Manitoba Practice Assessment Program (MPAP) designed to assess the competence of physicians practicing with a conditional license. Establishing the link between clinical practice and assessment of performance is critical in the development of the MPAP. A first step in establishing this link is to identify activities performed in actual clinical practice as well as the importance of those activities. METHODS: A descriptive survey design was used to answer the research questions: (1) How do physicians rate the complexity, frequency, and criticality of CanMEDS roles? (2) What is the distribution of perceived importance scores for the CanMEDS roles? Two online surveys, one specific to family practice physicians, and one specific to specialists, were emailed to a sample of Canadian physicians. RESULTS: Overall perceived importance scores were calculated for each of the CanMEDS roles. It appears that each role is considered to be at least moderately important. The Medical Expert role was ranked as the most important, followed by the roles of Communicator, Professional, Collaborator, Scholar, Manager, and Health Advocate. There were no significant differences in overall CanMEDS perceived importance scores between family practice physicians and specialists (N = 88). CONCLUSIONS: Given that each of the CanMEDS roles is considered at least moderately important, a variety of assessment tools are needed to evaluate competencies across the entire spectrum of roles. The results underscore the importance of incorporating a multifaceted approach when developing a practice assessment program.