Developing Nursing Well-Being and Leadership Tool Kit

Sponsored by Johnson & Johnson

As leaders throughout the healthcare system, today’s nurses are expected to promote self-care, personal health, and well-being. This tool kit was designed to help faculty develop curriculum and identify active learning strategies for building competencies in new nurses that are essential to fostering well-being, self-care, resilience, and leadership.

“Preparing new graduate nurses to be able to demonstrate a commitment to personal health and well-being through techniques like mindfulness and clinical practice will produce a more resilient nursing workforce”

- Meghan Hixenbaugh, MS, Assistant Professor, Mount Carmel College of Nursing

Pilot Schools

Ten schools with entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs received funding to pilot test learning strategies.

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Tool Kit

Tool kit offers strategies for meeting essential entry-level competencies in the area of personal, professional, and leadership development.

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Why Addressing Well-Being in Nurses is Important!

Nurses must navigate through complex systems, combating burnout and engaging in behaviors that impact the care they provide.

COVID-19 presented the nursing profession with a confluence of challenges, often referred to as "the perfect storm.” Some of these issues include nurse well-being challenges, generational changes, early retirements, high turnover, insufficient staffing, increasingly violent patients and visitors, and younger nurses leaving the profession (Sherman, R. 2021). Burnout, depression, anxiety, and suicide are now urgent concerns. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on health worker burnout, emphasizing its impact on public health.

In response to this silent crisis, a transformative shift is unfolding on a national scale, moving beyond crisis intervention to actively champion the health and well-being of nurses and healthcare professionals.

Adejoke Bolanle Ayoola, PhD
Department Chair, Calvin University

Inspiring Initiatives and AACN's Commitment

In 2017, the American Nurses Association (ANA) introduced the Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation^TM initiative.
Simultaneously, the National Academy of Medicine established the Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-being and Resilience (5).
Fast forward to 2020, members of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) passed a resolution titled A Call to Action for Academic Nurse Leaders to Promote Practices to Enhance Optimal Well-being, Resilience and Suicide Prevention in Schools of Nursing across the U.S.

AACN's resolution signifies a nationwide commitment to fortify practices that enhance optimal well-being, resilience, and prevent suicides in schools of nursing across the entire United States.

Importance of Academia and Practice Working Together

Academia and practice need to work together to develop strategies and prepare RNs, but also create an environment that allows RNs to thrive. Now more than ever it is imperative that academic and practice leaders form strategic partnerships to develop innovative approaches to prepare nurses for the real-world of nursing and to create an environment that allows them to thrive. Both academic and practice arenas have mutual interests in the well-being and resilience of students and employees; therefore, it benefits both entities to collaborate and combine resources, information, and expertise to identify creative solutions to shared challenges. With the transition to competency-based education, it becomes even more imperative for academia and practice to work together to ensure a common language and understanding of what is needed in today’s healthcare environment and how best to prepare nurses for a changing, more complex health system.

“But I think the surprise was how engaged our community partners were, our practice partners, and the students were, everyone sort of acknowledged that this was needed.”
– Sarah Brown Blake, Assistant Professor, California State University-Chico School of Nursing