Engaging Nurses In Professional Governance Across A Hospital Service Line
Professional governance is a best practice of contemporary nursing leadership. Strong professional governance is linked with higher levels of nurse engagement and lower levels of nurse turnover, influencing the strength of the nursing workforce and the financial position of healthcare organizations. Nevertheless, consistent with patterns seen nationally, a large academic medical center in the Southeast found that professional governance was strained postpandemic. A quality improvement project was developed to innovate professional governance within the organization, implementing a novel Service Line Council (SLC) across eight medical-surgical units of a hospital service line. The quality improvement project adapted the healthcare system’s traditional unit practice council structure to meet the needs of the workforce increasingly collaborating across multiple units within a hospital service line. Over 3 months, the project engaged 22 clinical nurses and five nurse leaders in an SLC professional governance structure. Using the Conditions for Work Effectiveness Questionnaire II, the project indicated a significant positive difference in the mean work empowerment scores of the clinical nurses participating in the project postsurvey (23.29 out of 30), compared to presurvey (19.75), t = 3.62, df = 31.8, p = .001. This difference represented a shift from a moderate to a high level of work empowerment. The outcomes of the project are significant to executive leaders shaping the nursing workforce. The project demonstrates the importance of aligning professional governance with evolving clinical and administrative structures, in so doing, ensuring that nursing is well placed to fulfill its social mandate to patients and the profession.
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