COVID-19: A Personal and Professional Perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of Americans, including health care staff. This article traces the experience of 1 nurse leader as she falls ill, only to learn that she has, indeed, been infected with the virus. She describes her 4-week quarantine, including the impact on her family and her attempts to continue to support her staff. As she recovers from the acute onslaught of COVID, the focus shifts back to her nurse leader role. In this role, she and her colleagues manage the logistics of caring for more than 150 COVID-positive patients a day in the 719-bed academic medical center. This included staffing the hospital, given the extreme challenges of staff availability limited by concerns such as school closings and at-risk family members. Now with the hospital's daily volume of COVID-positive patients greatly reduced, there is an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned, including what went well during the peak of the crisis and where there were opportunities. Leadership and staff are experiencing a sense of pride at their exceptional care of this complex population, even while exploring opportunities to be even better prepared should COVID erupt once again.

On-site Clinical Care for Professional Dance Companies.

Thirty years ago the introduction of on-site health care for professional dance companies was a novel concept and dance medicine clinicians often had limited on-site hours, restricted treatment space, and small budgets. Companies are now developing fully staffed on-site clinics and backstage care that provide a multidisciplinary approach to dancer health and wellness. On-site dance medicine programs focus on holistic dancer health and preventive care rather than just triage and rehabilitation. Best practice recommendations for care of professional dancer patients allow for streamlined patient care within a network of medical professionals who understand the demands of a professional dance career.

The CNO and Leading Innovation: Competencies for the Future.

Although innovation is critical to success in today's tumultuous environment, health care is slow to embrace it, and there is significant variability in strategic adoption of innovation across organizations. Nurse leaders do not need to be innovators themselves but must engage in, and have the ability to create, an organizational culture of innovation. Twenty-six leadership behaviors specific to innovation leadership were identified through a Delphi study to develop competencies as well as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that support nurse leaders in acquiring or expanding the capability of nurse leaders to create a culture of innovation. It was demonstrated that nursing innovation experts were able to differentiate between general leadership behaviors and innovation leader behaviors. In addition, the need to acquire basic leadership competencies before mastering innovation leader competencies was identified. Five strategies to initiate or expand a culture of innovation in organizations were identified, including (1) assessment of organizational capacity for innovation; (2) acknowledgement of the responsibility of all leaders to create an innovation-rich environment; (3) provision of education, skill building, and coaching; (4) encouragement of an ongoing practice of innovation, even in the face of failure; and (5) development of a sustainable culture of innovation.

Nursing Leadership and Care Coordination: Creating Excellence in Coordinating Care Across the Continuum.

Continuum Care is different today from in the past. It requires care coordination with an emphasis on relationships and new roles. Nurses and nurse leaders must be located at the epicenter of developing strategies to align resources with patients and family along all points of the continuum.

Grid resolution study of ground water flow and transport.

Three-dimensional grids representing a heterogeneous, ground water system are generated at 10 different resolutions in support of a site-scale flow and transport modeling effort. These grids represent hydrostratigraphy near Yucca Mountain, Nevada, consisting of 18 stratigraphic units with contrasting fluid flow and transport properties. The grid generation method allows the stratigraphy to be modeled by numerical grids of different resolution so that comparison studies can be performed to test for grid quality and determine the resolution required to resolve geologic structure and physical processes such as fluid flow and solute transport. The process of generating numerical grids with appropriate property distributions from geologic conceptual models is automated, thus making the entire process easy to implement with fewer user-induced errors. The series of grids of various resolutions are used to assess the level at which increasing resolution no longer influences the flow and solute transport results. Grid resolution is found to be a critical issue for ground water flow and solute transport. The resolution required in a particular instance is a function of the feature size of the model, the intrinsic properties of materials, the specific physics of the problem, and boundary conditions. The asymptotic nature of results related to flow and transport indicate that for a hydrologic model of the heterogeneous hydrostratigraphy under Yucca Mountain, a horizontal grid spacing of 600 m and vertical grid spacing of 40 m resolve the hydrostratigraphic model with sufficient precision to accurately model the hypothetical flow and solute transport to within 5% of the value that would be obtained with much higher resolution.

Patient care management as a global nursing concern.

Effective and efficient patient management is important in all health care environments because it influences clinical and financial outcomes as well as capacity. Design of care management processes is guided by specific principles. Roles (e.g., case management) and tools (e.g., clinical paths) provide essential foundations while attention to outcomes anchors the process.

Retreats as a foundation for change. The Global Nursing Exchange as a retreat.

Innovation often emerges from an opportunity to retreat and reflect, from being away from normally hectic lives. Although retreats are often considered solitary events, when experienced with colleagues and friends, they can produce significant outcomes. Creative ideas, creative approaches to stubborn issues, and new links to colleagues are some of the benefits.