Besides fellowship and support, AONL members will find plenty of useful information to take home with them.
Nurse leaders are gathering this week in San Antonio, Texas, for AONL 22, the annual conference of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL).
In addition to keynote presentations and preconference classes on certification and finances, nurse leaders can learn and gather information from more than 50 breakout sessions.
Within those breakout sessions, several themes have emerged, including these five:
1. Staffing and retention
With the extreme shortage of nurses in healthcare, nurse leaders are seeking ways to build their staffing pipelines and hold on to the nurses they have.
Several breakout sessions will address this, including:
Hold On to Your Nurse Managers Through a Comprehensive Retention Program—Retaining effective nurse managers is critical, affecting financial and quality outcomes as well as nurse satisfaction and retention.
Securing the Workforce: Transforming Nurse Externs into Graduate Nurses—Externships streamline potential graduate nurses to their future nursing careers by allowing them to work in other clinical roles to gain experience, resulting in better patient care and cost-effective orientations.
The Role of Specialty Associations to Address the Nursing Shortage—A new project strengthens the academic-service partnership to include a specialty association, the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), to attract and prepare nursing students to periop practice.
Successful COVID Facility Culture Validates Nurse Retention Framework—Elements of a highly successful nursing culture in a COVID facility were layered into a newly developed conceptual framework for nurse retention. The results were stunning.
2. Resilience
The past two years have required nurse leaders to be resilient and to help their staffs do the same.
Resilience and Mindfulness: Repair and Empower—Participants will learn to harness the power of mindfulness practice through an abbreviated program that is accessible, engaging, and supported by evidence so they can lead their organization's support for nurses' self-care.
Sink or Swim: A Holistic Approach to Nurse Manager Resilience—Assessment of a nurse manager’s work effectiveness both before and after structural changes.
Empowering Nurse Leaders to Support Staff Well-Being and Resilience—This session will provide leaders with actionable takeaways to better support the well-being of the nursing workforce of the future.
3. Health Equity
Nurses will play a large—if not the largest—part in the effort to address systemic inequities that have fueled health disparities, according to the National Academy of Medicine's report, The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity.
Public Health Nurses: Bridging the Gap to Health Equity—The role of public health nurses (PHNs) is to promote public wellness with a focus on the underserved and most vulnerable members of society.
Community Care Teams: Breakthrough Strategy for Health Care Equity—Community Care Teams is a strategy to improve healthcare equity and population health with 40% reduction in ED visits. The program is becoming a game changer for pediatric care providers, schools, and families.
Nurse Leaders: Empowered Advocates for Health Equity at the Board Table—Bringing the nursing perspective to organizational and public policy decisions emboldens advocacy for health equity and social change
4. Care models
With the nurse staffing shortage at crisis levels, healthcare organizations are required to rethink care models and look at alternative ways for future care delivery.
Implementing a Virtualized Clinical Care Model for Inpatient Nursing—Baptist Health System has implemented a virtualized nursing and clinical care services program in 345 medical-surgical beds across three hospitals.
Innovative Delivery of Care: Hospital at Home—Offering nursing care in the home for inpatients requires figuring out logistics for providing meals, implementing telemedicine to monitor vitals, and answering the patients' "call light."
Care Models of the Future: How & Why Complexity Leadership Theory (CLT) Works—CLT explains how the healthcare industry can adapt to the exodus and shortage of nurses. Results include significant improvements in retention, decreased patient harm, net promoter scores, and length of stay.
5. Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Increasing diversity in nursing is considered essential to improving health equity, according to research that indicates benefits to communication, access to care, and patient satisfaction.
A Guide to Building Mentoring Relationships with Black, Indigenous and People of Color—Even though leaders want up-and-comers to have a fair chance at success, BIPOC professionals (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) have other challenges and not everyone understands how racial bias works.
Nursing Leading the Way: Advancing Diversity, Equity & Inclusion—Participants will learn how an interprofessional team took the lead in developing and implementing a DEI nursing strategic plan across a large, integrated healthcare system.
Carol Davis is the Nursing Editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.