Advancing Professional Governance to Improve Health Outcomes.

Developing the skills and behaviors needed for nurses to lead in professional governance has long been a priority at the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL). The annual AONL Professional Governance Leadership Conference is an important part of advancing nursing professional governance, convening nurses in all roles to discuss professional governance concepts and leadership practices. AONL has produced publications and podcasts exploring the professional governance foundations, roles, and behaviors, available on its website. This article discusses AONL's partnership in the development of a new book, Professional Governance for Nursing: The Framework for Accountability, Engagement, and Excellence, edited by AONL faculty and former staff.

Renewing the Nursing Culture: Sustaining the Professional Community of Practice Through the Role of the Preceptor.

Culture is the driving frame within which all human action takes form. This article explores the elements and characteristics of culture and applies them to the nursing professional community of practice. As it drills down to the work in the cultural context, it argues for the central role of the preceptor in evidencing the influence of culture. For onboarding nurses and the nursing community, the preceptor becomes the carrier of culture, demonstrating the impact of culture in a way that exhibits its influence and impact on nursing practice and patient care.

A Road Map for the Development of a Decisional Authority Framework for Professional Governance Using Accountability Grids.

Although resources are available to guide structures and processes for professional governance, limited information exists about defining and legitimizing the decisional authority needed to support direct care nurses' ownership of clinical practice as well as the role of nursing leaders. This article presents a road map for creating and implementing clinical nurse, nurse leader, and nurse executive accountability grids with clearly delineated authority to provide a decisional authority framework for professional governance in one organization.

Abandoning Blue-Collar Management: Leading Nursing Professionals Into a New Age for Practice.

Leading professionals require a different set of skills from those used for most employee work groups. This article reviews the reasons why nursing professionals need different leadership capacity and what some of those changes might be.

The Verran Professional Governance Scale: Confirmatory and Exploratory Analysis.

This article describes psychometric testing and refinement of the Verran Professional Governance Scale (VPGS), which measures behaviors associated with professional governance. Phase 1 reduced the items on the scale based on floor and ceiling effects and redundancy of items. Phase 2 examined structural construct validity using exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The final 22-item instrument demonstrates satisfactory internal consistencies and fit indices and significant positive correlation between the VPGS, job satisfaction, and control over nursing practice.

Professional Governance in a Time of Crisis.

The global COVID-19 health crisis has significantly altered the structures and processes of healthcare in innumerable unanticipated ways. No profession has been more impacted or challenged than nursing. In many settings, nursing professional governance has been abandoned or neglected. The impact of this trend is outlined in this article. The authors suggest to nurse leaders that nursing professional governance can be an invaluable mechanism for nursing engagement in the midst of managing a crisis.

Complexity Leadership: Constructing 21st-Century Health Care.

In this 21st-century postdigital age, deeper and more relevant understandings of both structure and process are critical in laying the foundations for the success of human enterprises and systems for the foreseeable future. Leadership of these complex, networked initiatives and environments will require a fundamentally different understanding and tool sets essential to the well-designed, linked, and integrated undertaking of the human enterprise. This is no less true of the unfolding health care networks now becoming the substantive framework for the delivery of health care services in the foreseeable future. This article explicates the essentials of this new model for leadership.

Quantum Caring Leadership: Integrating Quantum Leadership With Caring Science.

The authors of this article integrate two historically parallel yet disparate fields of nursing, caring science theory and nursing quantum leadership science. Through a nursing, discipline-specific unitary paradigm lens, intersecting principles of caring science and quantum leadership science are uncovered. The result is a model for unitary, discipline-specific, nursing healthcare leadership: Quantum Caring Healthcare Leadership. Ontological congruence is uncovered among the philosophical-ethical-theoretical principles of caring science and the unifying disciplinary structural concepts from quantum leadership. The result is a model for discipline-specific, healthcare leadership. This convergence is potentially theory-generating for both unitary science and healthcare leadership. In this model, both quantum leadership and caring science are transformed and metamorphosed into a new unitary, discipline-specific entity to guide further advancement of knowledge, theory, and discipline-specific healthcare leadership and practice.