Visionary programs tailor-made for RNs’ ideas and needs

The nation’s healthcare system, complex and challenging, also appreciates innovation. Nurses see opportunities to improve processes and enhance patient outcomes. Frequently, we implement these innovations to benefit patients as part of our everyday practice. With investments and other development resources, we could scale these breakthroughs. However, getting the attention and funding to advance these insights can be a swim upstream for busy RNs dealing with existing workloads and detailed organizational assessment and approval procedures.

This is where the American Nurses Foundation (the Foundation), the philanthropic arm of the American Nurses Association (ANA), comes in. The Foundation excels at supporting nurses, their ideas, and their needs expediently and with a bent toward scaling great prototypes for the benefit of all nurses. The Foundation accomplishes this by listening intently to nurses and learning about their struggles and triumphs, challenges and successes.

The Pulse on the Nation’s Nurses Survey Series continues to serve as a rich source of feedback. The Foundation also couples quantitative data gained from Pulse surveys with qualitative input from virtual town halls and webinars, which offer new avenues for RNs to share their experiences and insights.

The Reimagining Nursing Initiative serves as a sterling example of how the Foundation acts on feedback from nurses. Now in its second year, Reimagining Nursing involves 10 visionary projects—led by nurses and funded by a $14 million grant—set to transform nursing. These prototypes, focused on developing practice-ready nurse graduates, technology-enabled nursing practice, and direct-reimbursement nursing models, are demonstrating outcomes and charting a path for widespread implementation (nursingworld.org/rninitiative).

Another Foundation initiative that arose from listening to nurses is Nurse Well-Being: Building Peer and Leadership Support. This unique program, adapted by nurses for nurses, uses the Stress First Aid peer support model as a framework to improve nurses’ recovery from stress reactions. Fifty nurse champions trained more than 1,000 nurses at four pilot sites; the overall burnout rate decreased by nearly 29% from baseline. The full slate of tools and resources from this remarkable undertaking are available to all nurses at nursingworld.org/foundation/programs/nurse-wellbeing.

Reimagining Nursing and the Nurse Well-Being program both arose from the needs nurses identified, and both have evolved based on feedback from nurses.

As Reimagining Nursing grantees moved into implementation, they recognized the need for well-being support to sustain their efforts’ momentum. Similarly, the four Nurse Well-Being pilots, originally intended as only peer-to-peer networks, provided valuable input about needing deeper leader engagement. The Foundation received this feedback, and with support from its donor partners, enhanced both programs as recommended.

This nimble approach enables nurse innovators to capitalize on their expertise in ways that otherwise might be overlooked. The Foundation’s model places nurses at the heart of its efforts of obtaining meaningful insights and executing well-planned—yet timely—program rollouts that adapt based on new inputs.

This unwavering focus, coupled with program and policy insights from both ANA and the American Nurses Credentialing Center, keep the Foundation on the frontier of supporting and investing in nurses. If you agree, as we do, in the power of these efforts to inspire transformative change in nursing and healthcare, please join us in donating to givetonursing.org.

Jennifer Mensik Kennedy PhD, MBA, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
President, American Nurses Association

Kathy Driscoll MSN, RN, NEA-BC, CCM
President, American Nurses Foundation