AONE has defined the key responsibilities for nurses in its Guiding Principles for the Role of the Nurse in Future Patient Care Delivery. The six elements of that model are the following:

1. The core of nursing is knowledge and caring.

2. Care is user based.

3. Knowledge for nursing is access based.

4. Knowledge for nursing is synthesized.

5. Care is provided through relationships, either in person or virtually.

6. The journey of care is managed through partnerships between patients and nurses.

Herrin-Griffith said these concepts embody a model of future care for the health care industry to develop and implement.

Nancy Donaldson, Co-Principal Investigator

Collaborative Alliance for Nursing Outcomes

A gap exists in efforts to engage hospitals in building capacity to reliably and strategically use measures to inform priorities and improve performance, said Donaldson. The Collaborative Alliance for Nursing Outcomes, which is the nation’s oldest nursing quality database and a joint venture between the Association of California Nurse Leaders and the American Nurses Association/California, advocated the following priorities:

1. Systematically build the capacity of clinicians and clinical administrator leaders to be accountable for and to use nursing quality data to guide decisions and performance.

2. Strengthen clinician access to and capacity to use web-based information.

3. Institutionalize ergonomic assessment of the potential impacts of patient care quality and safety initiatives on the nurse workload prior to implementation.

4. Invest in new metrics that add value for clinical administrative leaders and public policy stakeholders.

5. Operationalize the expectation that nurses systematically evaluate their practice.