By Maureen ‘Shawn’ Kennedy, AJN’s editor-in-chief, who is in Florida this week attending meetings and visiting local schools
It’s January and I’m in Miami (I know, I know). I just finished attending the CNL 2011 Summit (CNL = clinical nurse leader). It was a relatively small meeting, as nursing meetings go, with about 350 attendees who were CNLs, faculty or students in CNL programs, or chief nursing officers from clinical facilities employing CNLs. They were all believers in the value the role brings to clinical practice. There was an energy, an atmosphere of being in on a new and growing phenomenon.
Some background: the CNL is a relatively new role in nursing, first formally proposed by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing in 2003 after several meetings with other nursing groups concerned with nurses’ “education for practice” (see the white paper on the development of the role). CNLs function at the unit level, coordinating care, working with staff, focusing on improving outcomes.
Described as “master’s-prepared advanced generalists,” CNLs now number about 1,300, according to Mary Stachowiak (see photo), president of the Clinical Nurse Leader Association (CNLA). There are currently about 100 institutions with master’s programs preparing CNLs and about 1,800 CNLs in programs.
AJN carried a short news article back in October 2004 noting the creation of the new role, and in December 2005 we reported on the controversy surrounding the role, much of it coming from the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists (NACNS), who saw the role as duplicating some aspects of the CNS role in a way that might “disenfranchise” those who already had that credential.
More recently, our update in January 2010 showed that, while there still were some reservations about the role, broader support was emerging. Read the rest of this entry ?
