In 2006, Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened the Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Health Care. The roundtable members are health care leaders from government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, industry, academic, and medicine, and a nurse professional, Mary Naylor, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor and Director of the Center for Transitions in Health, University of Pennsylvania. The charter and vision of the roundtable is to help transform the way evidence on clinical effectiveness is generated and used to improve health and health care. Participants have set a goal that by 2020, 90% of the clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely, and up-to-date clinical information, and will reflect the best evidence. The roundtable assessments are reported in the 11 volumes of the IOM Learning Health System Series published by National Academic Press. The volume entitled Redesigning the Clinical Effectiveness Research Paradigm: Innovation and Practice-Based Approaches was released in July 2011. The volume begins, "Clinical Effectiveness Research (CER) serves as a bridge between the development of innovative treatments and therapies and their productive application to improve human health." The long-considered gold standard in clinical research "the Randomized Control Trial (RCT) is identified as muted by constraints in time, cost, and limited applicability. There exists a need to lead innovative approaches in a more practical and reliable clinical research paradigm and to build a system that clinical effectiveness research is a more natural by-product of the care process.
This IOM series aligns with academic and scholarly focus of The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health to increase the proportion of nurses with baccalaureate degrees to 80% by 2020 and double the number of nurses with a doctorate by 2020. Clinical effectiveness research and practice-based approaches cannot improve patient and family care outcomes without the profession of nursing being at the leadership table with advanced scientific knowledge and wisdom acquired through advanced degrees.
Impact factors in nursing journals are measures of citation frequency and are published annually in journal citation reports. Impact factors are widely used to demonstrate nursing knowledge and scholarship for the purpose of funding appointments, promotions, recognition, and diffusion of information. In concert with the above 2 IOM studies and the future of nursing science, it becomes imperative for the nursing profession to reverse the fact that nurse authors cite more medical journals than nursing journals (Nursing Outlook, January-February 2011).
Potpourri Facts:
* US health care costs currently exceed 17% of the gross domestic product and continue to rise.
* Seeing the color pink makes women feel "less likely" to think that they will get breast cancer; and makes them less likely to donate to cancer research (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2011).
* Nursing Executive Center National Meeting series for 2010-2011 identified the following 7 strategic imperatives to mobilize nursing for accountable care: (1) unlock further productivity improvements, (2) enhance individual nurses' stake in organizational outcomes, (3) avoid preventable readmissions, (4) determine accountable care strategy, (5) build the right compliment of staff, (6) deliver care in the leanest cost approximate setting, and (7) activate patients in self-directed care.
Finding:
To get employees to do something, managers need to ask them twice. Harvard Business Review (May 2011) article reported that managers without formal power sent more messages than managers with formal power, and also got tasks done faster and with fewer hiccups. Managers with power appeared to assume employees would fill their requests and had to deal with more blowups when they did not. Managers who were deliberately redundant moved their projects forward and more smoothly.
More facts next time!