Teams Model of Clinical Nursing Education: An Innovative Approach.

The need for registered nurses has never been greater. Only through thoughtful academic-practice partnerships will it be possible to align the current and future demands of the workplace with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are required. Outdated nursing education models that treat practice partners as "real estate" and try to expose all students, in the same way, to the full array of patient populations, most often in acute care settings, do not serve the profession well. Attending to the heightened expectations for nurses to lead complex, interprofessional teams across an array of settings led to the development of the Teams Model of clinical nursing education. In this model, students match to practice partner facilities where they complete the majority of their clinical hours. They do not rotate through various settings, they do not spend precious practice time reorienting to new facilities, and they are not relegated to the periphery of the interprofessional team when in the student role. They become expected and valuable members of the care delivery team. They focus on developing depth as a nurse rather than breath across patient populations. The Teams Model is predicated on advancing academic-practice partnerships that provide a pipeline for workforce development and prepares the new graduate as a work-ready hire. Ongoing evaluation of the students' development and their knowledge acquisition is linked to practice partner assessments and provides support for this model as an innovative alternative to preparing the next generation of nurses. This partnership program builds confidence through immersion experiences in a consistent, welcoming, and prepared clinical environment, with opportunities to advance the priorities of the practice setting in addition to promoting positive patient outcomes. Benefits include student exposure to nontraditional fields of nursing and areas of critical shortage as well as the ability to pivot quickly as workforce needs shift.

Statewide political activism for California academic nursing leaders.

The California Association of Colleges of Nursing (CACN) is a not-for-profit, non-partisan nursing organization whose members are the universities' Schools of Nursing that offer baccalaureate and graduate degree programs in California. The nursing deans and directors are the individuals who attend scheduled statewide meetings and actualize the mission, vision, and governance of this organization. Starting in 2011, CACN began a journey toward greater political activism that was initiated by strategic planning. During the Spring 2017 meeting, forty-four California nursing deans/directors advanced their advocacy by attending prescheduled visits with California legislators. The goals for meetings with California policy makers included: 1. Inform them about CACN as an organization and its sphere of influence and 2. Educate them about CACN's perspective on current bills in the California legislature. This manuscript details a process to assist other state organizations to move toward political activism in support of the nursing profession from the academic nursing leadership perspective.

Five recommendations for prelicensure clinical nursing education.

The acute shortage of RNs is both well established and projected to continue. Two primary factors contributing to the nursing shortage are insufficient numbers of faculty and insufficient clinical sites for students. Innovative academic-service partnerships are realigning these scarce resources to improve the quality of clinical education and build cultures of safety. Relationships among students, staff nurses, faculty, and the institutions where they practice are central to students' socialization, professional role development, and transition to practice. Five recommendations to strengthen these professional relationships are suggested to: reenvision nursing student-staff nurse relationships, reconceptualize the clinical faculty role, enhance development for school-based faculty and staff nurses working with students, reexamine the depth and breadth of the clinical component, and strengthen the evidence for best practices in clinical nursing education. Five key outcomes are suggested to evaluate both traditional and emerging approaches to clinical nursing education.

The clinical nurse leader: helping psychiatric mental health nurses transform their practice.

The national movement to transform the health care delivery systems must include a focus on mental health treatment. To address similar deficits across other practice domains, the Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL) role has been created. The CNL is a master's degree that prepares a nurse to use a systems perspective to improve outcomes for a cohort of patient, deliver care based on best practices, and coordinate care in a multidisciplinary team. Applying the CNL role to mental health care could help psychiatric mental health nursing be at the forefront in the transformation of mental health care delivery.

Preparing for prescriptive privileges: a standard for the psychiatric-mental health preceptorship.

TOPIC: Establishing a standard for preparation for prescriptive authority for advanced practice psychiatric nurses. PURPOSE: To outline a best practice standard for the clinical and prescriptive authority preceptorship. SOURCES: NACNS and NONPF competencies and practice guidelines. CONCLUSIONS: The authors recommend a clinical preceptorship with planned faculty monitoring, clinical logs, case studies, and group supervision to prepare the psychiatric-mental health advanced practice nurse to serve within the expanded prescribing role.