An innovative, multidisciplinary strategy to improve retention of nursing students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Nursing students from disadvantaged backgrounds must overcome many barriers in order to succeed. This article will focus on how a multidisciplinary team helped 76 percent of these high-risk students persist in their nursing programs by addressing some of these barriers. Three baccalaureate nursing schools in the Texas Medical Center embarked on a three-year retention program designed to enhance the success of students identified by federal criteria as being at risk. Multidisciplinary teams led various activities, including a study skills component, which included preparing for lectures, taking notes, critical thinking, and test-taking strategies. Also addressed were written and oral communication skills, medical terminology, critical thinking, career coaching, and socialization activities. Collaboration among faculty and students at the three schools was key to the success of the program.

Mentoring disadvantaged nursing students through technical writing workshops.

Recent studies have identified a problematic gap for nursing students between terse clinical writing and formal academic writing. This gap can create a potential barrier to academic and workplace success, especially for disadvantaged nursing students who have not acquired the disciplinary conventions and sophisticated writing required in upper-level nursing courses. The authors demonstrate the need for writing-in-the-discipline activities to enhance the writing skills of nursing students, describe the technical writing workshops they developed to mentor minority and disadvantaged nursing students, and provide recommendations to stimulate educator dialogue across disciplines and institutions.

Leadership skills and attributes of women and nurse executives: challenges for the 21st century.

This study used a descriptive comparative design in which the skills/attributes identified by women leaders were compared to the skills/attributes identified by the nurse executives (NEs). For the women leaders and NEs, 6 factors were identified through principal components analysis: (1) personal integrity, (2) strategic vision/action orientation, (3) team building/communication skills, (4) management and technical competencies, (5) people skills (eg, empowering others, networking, valuing diversity, working collaboratively), and (6) personal survival skills/attributes (eg, political sensitivity, self-direction, self-reliance, courage, and candor). The items that received the highest level of agreement regarding importance for both groups were contained in the personal integrity factor, which included ethical standards, trustworthiness, and credibility. These factors are discussed and implications for leadership development and nursing administration graduate programs are identified.