In January 2005, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published the first issue of Charting Nursing's Future. Now a series of policy briefs, Charting Nursing's Future was conceived as a way to educate and inform hospital executives, state and national lawmakers, nursing and nursing education leaders and other policy-makers about a wide range of issues relating to the nursing shortage, the role of nurses in quality initiatives and more.
Since the inaugural issue, Charting Nursing's Future has addressed topics such as nursing education, collaboration to ease the nursing shortage, recruitment and retention, transformation of the work environment, nursing workforce data collection, quality patient care, the nursing faculty shortage and the role of nurse leaders in transforming public health.
Latest Brief Examines Ways to Implement Future of Nursing Recommendations
A four-part series explores nurses’ educational progression (2 of 4 published)
For more than a decade, health professionals have strived to build safer, more efficient, and less costly systems of care, with the goals of reducing medical error, improving health outcomes, providing more preventive care, and increasing patient engagement in care decisions. In the process, a consensus has emerged among those in the vanguard that these safety and quality goals can best be met by replacing conventional siloed care delivery with a collaborative, coordinated approach that capitalizes on the unique expertise of each profession.
Although the system as a whole struggles to implement this vision, significant strides have been made in every health care arena. This brief showcases interprofessional practice, discusses the educational transformation needed to prepare health professionals to provide collaborative care, and looks at policies that support its delivery.
- Read the Charting Nursing's Future brief, "Implementing the IOM Future of Nursing Report -- Part II: The Potential of Interprofessional Collaborative Care to Improve Safety and Quality" (published November 2011)
A key set of recommendations from last year’s groundbreaking Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, focuses on nurse education. What is now known as the “80 by ‘20” recommendation calls for a series of measures to increase the share of nurses with bachelor’s degrees or higher to 80 percent by 2020. A separate recommendation calls for doubling the number of nurses with doctorates in that same time frame.
But how do we get from here to there?
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s latest Charting Nursing’s Future policy brief maps out possible answers, highlighting a number of programs to address the nation’s looming nursing shortage, while also preparing the nursing workforce for the challenges associated with caring for an aging population and expanding access to care. Some of the highlighted programs are already in place and showing results, and some are in the planning stage.
- Read the Charting Nursing’s Future brief, “Implementing the IOM Future of Nursing Report—Part 1: How to Dramatically Increase the Formal Education of America’s Nursing Workforce by 2020.” (Published August 2011)
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