Transition of New Graduate Nurses to the Workforce: Challenges and Solutions in the Changing Health Care Environment.

New graduate nurses face a host of challenges that impact successful transition to practice. Health care organizations thus need to understand how changes in the health care landscape impact new graduate nurses who are transitioning to the practice environment. This commentary discusses challenges and possible solutions to successful transition of new graduates into the work environment.

Warning: retention may be dangerous to your organization's health.

In times of personnel shortages, we too often think we must avoid turnover at all costs. Yet some turnover is desirable and much needed. Retaining the wrong individuals can obstruct the very changes essential for our organizations' survival.

The role of the nurse in the millennium.

The paper emphasizes the changing role of the nurse in the millenium. The changes will be in three basic fields: 1. Education: In education, the criteria for acceptance to nursing school will become higher, so that the requirement for trained nurses will increase. The new nurse will be focused on the role of management and leadership. 2. Service: The nursing service will be the guider which will lead the discipline of nursing treatment via knowledge, new nursing technologies and new managing techniques. The service will change the professional independence of the nurse into full partner and collaborator with other professions. 3. Community: The new nurses role will be derived from a new concept of "health for all" which will lead to a wider view of the entire community. Management will be the major qualification needed by the community nurse, using judgement, advanced knowledge and the ability of decision making and determining priorities. The nurse will have to fit her abilities and qualifications to the changes needed, using authority, responsibility and advanced knowledge.

The nurse of tomorrow.

Even since 1950, the seventh of April has been celebrated as World Health Day, because it marks the date in 1948 when WHO was founded. Each year a theme related to international public health has been chosen for World Health Day, with an appropriate slogan. This year the slogan is "Health for all--all for health." In 1954, "The nurse--pioneer of health" was selected as the slogan "to", in the words of former WHO Director-General Marcolino Candau, "bring about a clearer realization of the fundamental importance of the nurse's work for the health of the world." At the time Dr Candau took the opportunity to acknowledge "the valuable support and cooperation which WHO has consistently received from the ICN both before and since its admission into official relationship." To promote the nursing theme in 1954, material was prepared by the WHO for distribution to organizations and media around the world. Included in its kit was the following article by Daisy Bridges, ICN Executive Secretary 1948-61. Written 35 years ago, when ICN had already been in existence for over a half century, this article aptly expresses an ICN philosophy that remains unchanged and illustrates how ICN since its inception in 1899 has been working toward developing a nursing profession that can, with other health disciplines, not only help care for the sick, prevent disease and promote health but share in the planning of such a service and take the responsibility for its own professional contribution.