Commentary: The Nursing Workforce: Who Will Be Left to Answer the Call?

Nursing leaders play a critical role in responding to health human resource challenges. Innovative approaches are needed to retain and support the nursing workforce; recruitment alone is unlikely to address the gap. Actions to robustly support the onboarding of new graduate nurses, ongoing professional development opportunities and creative scheduling arrangements are all required to retain nurses. Shifting to a widened definition of the "health team" and a move from the traditionally siloed scope of practice models will require a transformational shift in thinking, and nursing leaders must lead that change. Health human resource planning must also occur in lockstep with population health planning.

Letter to the Editor.

Thank you for initiating an important conversation regarding NCLEX-RN implementation and experience in Canada. We are three nursing leaders in the province of British Columbia (BC) with continued interest in the governance, regulation and contribution of nursing locally, provincially and nationally. We hold or have held senior policy positions in BC, including in roles responsible for nursing regulation and practice. It is not our intent to replay the past in relation to the exam; rather, our commentary is intended to position the discourse in the broader context of practice regulation and the roles/responsibilities of regulators in our country.

Optimizing learning in healthcare: how Island Health is evolving to learn at the speed of change.

Healthcare organizations are challenged with constrained resources and increasing service demands by an aging population with complex care needs. Exponential growth in competency requirements also challenges staff's ability to provide quality patient care. How can a healthcare organization support its staff to learn "at or above the speed of change" while continuing to provide the quality patient care? Island Health is addressing this challenge by transforming its traditional education model into an innovative, evidence-based learning and performance support approach. Implementation of the methodology is yielding several lessons learned, both for the internal Learning and Performance Support team, and for what it takes to bring a new way of doing business into an organization. A key result is that this approach is enabling the organization to be more responsive in helping staff gain and maintain competencies.

Safety for all: bringing together patient and employee safety.

The safety of patients and of employees in healthcare have historically been separately managed and regulated. Despite efforts to reduce injury rates for employees and adverse events for patients, healthcare organizations continue to see less-than-optimal outcomes in both domains. This article challenges readers to consider how the traditional siloed approach to patient and employee safety can lead to duplication of effort, confusion, missed opportunities and unintended consequences. The authors propose that only through integrating patient and employee safety activities and challenging the paradigms that juxtapose the two will healthcare organizations experience sustained and improved safety practice and outcomes.