Title : Creating caring cultures: A blueprint for future nurse leaders
Abstract:
With a focus on mental health and wellness, the new nurse leader must be equipped to meet the demands of a post-pandemic healthcare system and the new nurse graduate. COVID-19 refaced nursing and healthcare, exposing cracks in systems of care delivery, deepening into fissures as the pandemic reached its peak in late summer 2020. The stress on the healthcare system left lasting impressions on nurses at the bedside. Nurses experienced distress, not just from being short-staffed. Post-pandemic literature is filled with incidents of nurses feeling abandoned by their leaders, further impacting mental health and wellness. During the pandemic, we saw retired practices, such as team nursing, return as a solution to address the chaos and overcrowding of emergency departments (ED) and hospital units. Future needs of the nursing workforce was published by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) in The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education (2021). As a response, holistic leadership was chosen as a model to develop a new leadership and management curriculum aimed at addressing the needs of healthcare systems, employees, and their patients. Leaders of the future will be required to build cultures of care in which wellness, equity, and interprofessional collaboration are at the forefront, showing again that something old can be made new.
