A Healthcare-Academic Practice Partnership Program to Promote Student Nurse Readiness for Work.

Highly skilled new graduate nurses must be better prepared to face the clinical and professional challenges in today's healthcare environment. Compounding these challenges are the growing resignations of clinical faculty and experienced clinical nurses. Innovative programs are needed to bridge the knowledge-practice gap with opportunities to create pipelines to aid the future nursing workforce. A multihospital health system partnered with a local college of nursing to develop a Nursing Student Pipeline Program, which allows nursing students to perform select nursing tasks as employees of the health system. Fifty-six students have been hired to participate in the pilot program. Of the students eligible for hire and who completed the program, 24 are current employees with the healthcare system. Students, preceptors, and managers report the benefits of this program, including that participating in the program supports increasing readiness for practice upon graduation.

The Impact of a Nurse Leader Learning Laboratory on Nurse Manager Perception of Leadership Competency and Skills.

This quality improvement project sought to improve nurse managers' perceptions of leadership competencies through experiential nurse leader laboratories. Nurse managers attended a 3-month pilot of nurse leader learning laboratories that included didactic and experiential components derived from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership's competencies. Clinical significance can be inferred from increases in postintervention Emotional Intelligence Assessment scores and postintervention increases in all categories of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership's Nurse Manager Skills Inventory; therefore, healthcare organizations stand to reap the benefits of cultivating leadership competencies among experienced and novice tenured nurse managers.