Nurses have the potential to play critical leadership roles – they are caregivers, mentors, teachers and researchers; and they provide 95 percent of direct patient care in hospitals. Our co-founder, Betty Irene Moore, recognized the critical role nurses play during her own experiences in the hospital. This recognition gave rise to the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative and a vision and hope for nurses to lead within their teams, organizations and communities to improve the experience and outcomes of patient care.
To significantly enhance the personal leadership skills and motivation of front-line registered nurses and other clinicians, we set forth a multi-pronged approach that included:
- supporting intensive, multi-year leadership development programs which select and support those who are change agents in their own right and who can mentor others to become change agents;
- providing meaningful opportunities (e.g., leading efforts to improve safety and quality) for RNs to develop and demonstrate their leadership skills in clinical settings;
- introducing the San Francisco Bay Area nursing workforce to national nursing leaders who have made a difference both inside and outside the profession; and
- creating professional networks which enable peer support and mentoring.
The programs within these strategies supported the development of a wide range of skills—technical, managerial, communications and research – that were obtained through practical and meaningful projects. You can learn more about how we helped build and develop a well-prepared nursing workforce in the San Francisco Bay Area here.
Over the course of our work, we partnered with a number of nationally-recognized nurse leaders whose leadership spans nursing, health care, government and other sectors. In an effort to share the lessons they learned and the strategies that they deployed as leaders in nursing, we created a collection of 13 videos titled: Lessons in Leadership, along with other materials to use in having conversations with future nurse leaders. The leaders include numerous recipients of “Living Legend” awards; faculty members from top universities; CEOs, executive directors and board members of the nation’s leading health care organizations; and prominent policy advisors. The themes of professional and personal triumph echoed in the videos are a testament to the elevated leadership role of nurses today.
We invite you to share and use the collection to inspire future leaders in nursing and health care. All videos can be viewed on our YouTube channel under the Patient Care Program and Nurses Share Lessons in Leadership playlists here.
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