For further information contact:
Marie E. Sinioris
National Center for Healthcare Leadership
Phone: (312) 755-5018

NCHL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT STUDY TO FOCUS ON NURSING WITHIN SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAMS OF HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS

CHICAGO, December 5, 2005 -- The National Center for Healthcare Leadership (NCHL) has received a $380,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the role and responsibility of nurse leaders within senior management teams of hospitals and health systems.

With this new initiative, NCHL will assess the effectiveness of senior leadership teams in 15 organizations participating in a learning collaborative in order to enhance the visibility and importance of nursing leadership and nursing. The project will use evidence-based leadership development methods to improve senior leadership team effectiveness as a predicate to achieve quality and patient safety performance goals in hospitals and health systems.

“Patient safety and the delivery of quality patient care can be linked to organizational excellence that emanates from effective inter-professional leadership teams, including strong nursing leadership,” NCHL President and CEO Marie E. Sinioris said. “Too often, though, nursing roles are not well defined for leading quality and patient safety initiatives. And, nurses are often promoted into expanded management job responsibilities with no formal preparation. We hope to use leadership development interventions aimed at the senior management team to more fully engage nurse executives in quality and patient safety initiatives and to optimize the role of the nurse leaders and improve team performance.”

The grant covers the first 18 months of a multi-year project. Phase 1 will include conducting qualitative research with nurses, physicians, and administrators at organizations that will include members of NCHL’s Leadership Excellence Networks (LENS), a collaborative network for CEOs and other executives that promotes sharing and learning across industry sectors. The research results will be used to design and implement specific action-learning leadership development programs. The intervention, which will be aimed at the nurse leaders and the senior management team, will be piloted in at least three sites in the LENS. NCHL will begin working with its Nurse and Physician Leadership Advisory Task Force immediately to plan the roll-out the new project in the first quarter of 2006.

This is the third grant that NCHL has received from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Earlier national projects worked to improve leadership development programs for health care organizations and universities, and to improve the education and training of healthcare executives.

“We remain grateful to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its continuing support as we expand the use of evidence-based learning initiatives in healthcare leadership development as part of national efforts to improve quality and patient safety,” Sinioris added.

About the National Center for Healthcare Leadership
The National Center for Healthcare Leadership (NCHL) is a not-for-profit organization based in Chicago. Its vision is to be an industry-wide catalyst to improve the health of the public through evidence-based leadership and improved organizational performance. For more information, please visit the NCHL Web site at www.nchl.org.

About The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Princeton, N.J., is the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans.

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