Capturing the Voices of Leaders Penn Nursing has long played a vital vital role in pushing forward a national dialogue regarding a nurse’s role in leading healthcare teams and advancing health. The School has been proud to partner with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in these efforts. This has included having several of our faculty and alumni participate in the Lessons in Leadership: The Betty Irene Moore Speaker Series, which brought together 12 national leaders in nursing and healthcare to discuss how they best lead to improve and influence practice and policy. Now, with a recent grant to the School, the Moore Foundation has given Penn Nursing the tools to frame a curriculum for nursing schools and health systems across the country that builds off this series. At the conclusion of the speaker series, Penn Nursing’s Mary Naylor, RN, PhD, led a project that produced a collection of 13 videos: individual videos of each of the
12 featured leaders, developed from the original Speaker Series audio recordings, and a compilation video highlighting advice from all 12 leaders. Available for the public, these videos are designed to inspire nursing students and frontline nurses to develop and exert leadership regardless of their formal position, inject the voice of nursing leaders into the general conversation about leadership, and help stimulate a national conversation about leadership in health at the frontlines. Last fall, Penn Nursing was awarded a grant to develop discussion guides for each video, specific to the School’s curriculum. This grant was increased to support the creation of guides that could be used by nursing schools and health system leaders nationally. Over the past year, Penn Nursing’s Cheryl Neisser led a team in reviewing Penn Nursing’s entire curriculum and identifying opportunities to incorporate the usage of these videos. After evaluating the School’s options, Neisser’s team also partnered with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to find ways to share it with members of their network. The tools developed by Dr. Neisser and her team will help our students and others to better view, study and discuss the Leadership series – inspiring them to develop and exert their own leadership skills, share their voice to move forward practice and policy, and contribute and guide national dialogue about frontline healthcare.
Penn Nursing Dean Emerita Claire M. Fagin, PhD, FAAN, RN is among the trailblazers featured in the Lessons and Leadership video series.
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“Including the video series as an integral part of our Penn Nursing curriculum will help ensure that every one of our undergraduates is exposed to some of the most prominent and influential nurse leaders of our time,” said Dr. Neisser. “These guides will help our students, as well as practicing nurses and students across the country develop leadership potential, become more aware of various forms of and paths towards leadership, and eventually become those forward thinking leaders that healthcare today needs.”