Reports that new nurse graduates are not sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce are of concern to educators, employers, and other stakeholders. Often, this lack of 'practice readiness' is defined in relation to an inability to 'hit the ground running' and is attributed to a 'gap' between theory and practice and the nature of current work environments. To gain a deeper understanding of the process of making the transition from student to graduate nurse, discussion groups were held across Alberta with 14 new graduates and 133 staff nurses, employers, and educators. Five additional new graduates and 34 staff nurses, employers, and educators provided input by fax or e-mail. The findings of this initiative speak to the need to examine assumptions underlying 'practice readiness' and what constitutes an effective transition to the workplace. The problems to be addressed are complex and a wide range of sustainable, evidence-based approaches are required to resolve them.

Ensuring that nurses can practise according to the philosophical underpinnings of their profession is recognized as an important factor in job satisfaction and is therefore a key element of retention and recruitment of the nursing workforce. Creating a culture of excellence requires making explicit a set of values and performance expectations to which all nurses can subscribe and that influences practice behaviours. The vice president and chief nursing officer of a large health region in Western Canada therefore sought to establish a foundation for building such a culture of excellence, through the creation of a mission, vision and Professional Practice Framework for the region's nurses. The author describes the development of the nursing Professional Practice Framework for this health region, presents the results of a participatory approach to promoting nurses' ownership of the model and discusses plans for assessing the impact of the framework on nurses' practice and patient care.