True Believers at the 2011 Clinical Nurse Leader Summit

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 […]

2016-11-21T13:14:15-05:00January 26th, 2011|career|1 Comment

Revamping CE

By Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN interim editor-in-chief

I finally got to the bottom of my inbox. There I found a transcript of a Webcast I had listened to back in December. I had forgotten about it and am amazed that there wasn’t more buzz around it because there’s a call for a drastic overhaul of continuing education for health professionals.

 

On December 4, the Institute of Medicine released a report, Redesigning CE in the Health Professions, which is the result of consensus recommendations by (what else?) a group of experts.

The experts were harsh in their criticisms, claiming that there are “major flaws in the way CE is conducted, financed, regulated and evaluated.” They also noted conflicts of interest and varying regulations from state to state, and pointed out that the scientific basis of CE is underdeveloped and lacks an interdisciplinary format.

You can read the full report online—but briefly, it calls for a federal “blue ribbon panel” to develop an interprofessional, independent Continuing Professional Development Institute to provide oversight to ensure reforms, new processes and accountability. 

Changes are coming . . . and it’s about time.

Bookmark and Share

2016-11-21T13:19:12-05:00February 22nd, 2010|Nursing|0 Comments

National Forum to Focus on Role of Nursing in Community, Public Health, Primary Care, and Long-Term Care Settings


Below is a press release we received for an important and timely December 3rd event on the future of nursing, including links to attend the forum by live Webcast or to follow it on Twitter.

Initiative Exploring the Future of Nursing Convenes National Forum in Philadelphia

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing, at the Institute of Medicine (www.iom.edu/nursing) will hold the second of three national forums on December 3 in Philadelphia. Participants including committee chair Donna Shalala discuss how to improve the delivery of medical treatment for Americans in Community Health, Public Health, Primary Care, and Long-Term Care settings across the country. This forum will look at opportunities in which nurses – who are key front-line providers of care – can play a role in ensuring patients in all settings receive the best possible care.

**A live webcast of the meeting will be available via www.thefutureofnursing.org**

**Follow the forum live on Twitter at http://twitter.com/FutureofNursing**

[…]

Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have an Office of the National Nurse?

By Diana Mason, editor-in-chief emeritus

Ann Keen

First, the necessary throat-clearing about who and where: I recently attended a public session held by the Institute of Medicine Initiative on the Future of Nursing. Chaired by University of Miami president and former secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and chief nurse for Cedar Sinai Medical Center Linda Burnes Bolton, the session began with presentations by two nurses involved in the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in England: Ann Keen, Member of Parliament and Parliamentary Undersecretary for Health Services, who chairs the British commission; and Jane Salvage, the lead secretariat for the commission and a former contributing editor for AJN.

Now the point: During the formal session, Keen noted that various countries in the UK each have a chief nurse officer (CNO) who is responsible for developing a national nursing strategy. Afterwards, I interviewed Keen and Salvage, who both said they didn’t understand why American nurses were not supporting the call for a CNO for the United States, one who would be charged with developing and overseeing a national nursing strategy for this nation. In their eyes, a CNO who is on par with the surgeon general could help the nation to develop approaches to ensure an adequate nursing workforce, identify barriers to their full utilization, identify new models of care to better promote the health of the public, and develop strategies […]

Medical Research–You Get What You Pay For

But someone is paying for the production of the content on the Internet—if it’s not a reputable organization or journal, who is it? Is it unbiased? Is it evidence-based, and who vetted the evidence and the authors? Let the readers—and their patients—be wary of what they read online and ask themselves just who paid for it, and why.

Go to Top