Nursing I Pass the Baton

After seven years under the leadership of Linda Cronenwett, PhD, RN, FAAN, and her team at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project transitions this summer to the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University, under the leadership of Mary A. Dolansky, PhD, RN.

The transition marks the successful completion of the first four phases of the project, which launched at UNC in 2005. Each phase was supported by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) grants. The overall goal of the project was, and remains, to prepare nurses who have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to continuously improve the quality and safety of the health care systems in which they work.

In the early years of the project, Cronenwett and her UNC team worked with QSEN faculty—experts drawn from institutions across the nation—to define a comprehensive set of quality and safety competencies for nurses. QSEN faculty then surveyed nursing programs to gauge the extent to which these competencies were already included in curricula, whether faculty were sufficiently expert to teach them, and how well nursing students were learning them. That effort also included an 18-month learning collaborative of 15 nursing programs around the nation whose faculties generated strategies for fostering learning of the six QSEN competencies: patient-centered care; teamwork and collaboration; evidence-based practice; quality improvement; safety; and informatics.

Beginning in 2009, Cronenwett, co-investigator Gwen Sherwood, PhD, RN, FAAN, and their colleagues at UNC partnered with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) to focus on developing the faculty expertise needed at the nation's nursing schools to teach the QSEN core competencies. They also worked to instill those competencies in textbooks, licensing, accreditation and certification, and to promote continued innovation in teaching them.

The final phase of QSEN at UNC culminated in the publication of a new textbook, Quality and Safety in Nursing: A Competency Approach to Improving Outcomes, edited by Sherwood and Jane Barnsteiner, PhD, RN, FAAN. It features chapter contributions from a distinguished roster of experts, including several members of the QSEN Faculty and Advisory Board.

Charles Hale Hoyt (July 26, 1859 - November 20, 1900) was an American dramatist.
Hoyt was born in Concord, New Hampshire. He had a difficult childhood, as his mother died when he was nine years old. He graduated at the Boston Latin School and, after being engaged in the cattle business in Colorado for a time, took up newspaper work, first with...

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