The Power of Professional Nursing Practice – An Essential Element of Patient and Family Centered Care

Abstract

Understanding power and learning how to use it is critical if nurses' efforts to shape their practice and work environments are to be successful. As part of our efforts to develop a Fast-Track BSN-to-PhD nursing program, we met with nurse leaders from six organizations to explore what power means, how nurses acquire it, and how they demonstrate it in their practice. Through these discussions, we identified eight characteristics of powerful nursing practice that, together, form a framework that can guide nurses’ efforts to develop a powerful practice and shape the health care delivery settings and academic institutions in which they work. In this article we review recent studies of organizational power and share discussions which helped us better understand nursing power and the ways in which it is manifested. We also reflect on what power means for individual nurses and the profession and discuss how our insights influenced our Fast-Track program.

The Hidden “Who” in Leadership Education: Conceptualizing Leadership Educator Professional Identity Development

“…This conflict of feeling incompetent versus the expectation of needing to be the expert (Fuller & Bown, 1975;Katz & Raths, 1992;Volkmann & Anderson, 1998as cited in Pillen, Den Broka, & Beijaard, 2013) may lead to self-doubt in one's ability to be a leadership educator. On the other hand, because professional credibility can be enhanced through developing expertise (Ponte, Glazer, Dann, McCollum, Gross, & Tyrrell, et al, 2007), it might also lead to feeling pressure to gain competence to maintain leadership educator status. For example, this may occur when someone teaches or facilitates on a leadership topic he or she is not very knowledgeable in and then has students question or challenge the content in ways that the educator cannot respond adequately.…”