All our lives evolve around partnerships. The topical focus for this issue is about partnerships: partnerships between organizations, partnerships within an organization, and partnerships with services, people, places, and businesses. The world evolves around partnerships and so does nursing, with the greatest of partnerships being the one between caregivers and patients.
Dr Linda Burnes Bolton and Dr Roy L. Simpson are pleased to present this issue to you from our history of partnership as collegial friends. Our friendship has spanned years of respect, admiration (and even at times, discord), with the mutual goal of advancing our profession. We have experienced many partnerships with nurse executives over the years, which we both hold close to our hearts. That's why we agreed to co-edit this issue of Nursing Administration Quarterly (NAQ).
This issue brings us back to a past partnership established by Dr Barbara J. Brown when she launched NAQ with an "On the Scene" series of articles. On the Scene was a partnership between Practice and Publishing. It has stood the test of time, as Dr Kathleen Sanford promulgates today by partnering with Practice to advance the science and art of nurse executive leadership. Our current "On the Scene" offering supports the partnership described by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and Manatt Health. Their report, Advancing Healthcare Transformation: A New Era for Academic Nursing, addresses how baccalaureate and higher degree schools of nursing can amplify their role in improving health and health care at the local, state, and national levels. Emory University Nell Hodgson School of Nursing and the Emory University Healthcare describe how they apply the lived experience of advancing the goals of academic nursing. Drs McCauley and Pappas set the stage for the advancement of academic nursing centers with their cadre of executive leaders
In addition to our "On the scene" collection of articles, we present 2 other exemplars of partnerships in practice. In the first, the authors of SAFE Care Partnership describe the process for engaging nurse leaders of hospitals to spread a proven intervention for delivery of safe, effective, and efficient care to frail elderly patients. Hospitalized frail elderly patients often experience extended hospital lengths of stay; increased number of nurse-sensitive events, including falls and acquisition of pressure ulcers; and higher hospital readmission rates. Nurse executives and their teams of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, therapists, and nurse scientists joined a system collaborative to achieve improvements. Ansryan and colleagues describe their efforts to engage and support system learning as the basis for adopting, adapting, or abandoning care practices.
The second article concerns nursing partnerships in research and quality. Jang, Weberg, and Dower achieved system-level engagement to launch improvements within an academic health system by integrating nursing research and quality practices. The authors describe the process steps used to advance the practice of nursing within the system, through the engagement of partners from administration, clinical care, patient care quality, and nursing research.
We hope you enjoy learning about these partnerships as much as we enjoyed getting this issue of NAQ ready for prime-time reading for you, the readers of NAQ.
-Roy L. Simpson, DNP, RN, FAAN, DPNAP, FACMI
Professor and Asst Dean Technology Management
Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia
-Linda Burnes Bolton, DrPH, RN, FAAN
Senior Vice President Nursing, Chief Nursing Executive
Professor and holder of the James Klinenberg, MD, and Lynn Klinenberg-Linkin Endowed Chair in Nursing
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Los Angeles, California