Registered nurses provide 95 percent of direct patient care in hospitals, so ensuring a sufficiently large and well-prepared nursing workforce is important to people and the kind of care they want to receive. For more than a decade, the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative partnered with experts in the field and dedicated the necessary resources to secure a nursing workforce in the San Francisco Bay Area that has the necessary skills and clinical preparation to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care. To achieve this, we focused our efforts on the greatest needs at the time – from addressing a nursing shortage to strengthening RNs’ clinical and patient management skills.
An early important area of our work focused on implementing strategies to expand pre-licensure education, by training and funding more RN educators, expanding pre-licensure programs through new, innovative models, and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of clinical training opportunities. At a point when the economy began to impact new graduates’ ability to find jobs, our grantee partners refined and implemented a RN Transition Program designed to build competence, confidence and employability for new graduates.
Building competencies was an essential part of our efforts, and it stemmed directly from Betty Irene Moore’s vision to help nurses deliver high-quality, safe care. We worked with all San Francisco Bay Area schools of nursing to incorporate the Quality and Safety Education for Nursing competencies, a framework to increase knowledge, skills and attitudes in patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, evidence-based practice, quality and safety improvements, and use of informatics.
These collective efforts resulted in the San Francisco Bay Area having:
- More than 200 new nurse faculty and clinical adjunct faculty teaching schools of nursing, leading to more than 1,000 new RNs within five years.
- 345 nursing graduates participate in four pilot transition programs that increased their competence; 84 percent were employed three months after completing the programs, compared to a California statewide average at that time of 57 percent.
- The Centralized Clinical Placement System, an online platform that matches nursing school students with clinical placement opportunities – eighty percent of the schools of nursing and adult acute care hospitals actively use the system.
- Development of regional simulation centers.
A key element of all nursing initiative workforce programs was the collaboration among nursing community stakeholders, including schools of nursing, hospitals, clinics and others. This regional approach helped to develop innovative programs as solutions to the root causes of RN workforce issues and to create better coordination between schools and practice settings.
We invite you to watch our brief video highlighting stories from several of the schools of nursing, faculty and students we worked with to transform the skills of new RNs and the quality of care delivered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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