Developing and Sustaining an Effective Executive Nursing Council Structure in an Academic Medical Center

Abstract

Nurse leaders are dependent on establishing and maintaining highly functional productive council structures to guide and ensure that our patients’, staff’s, families’, and organizational needs are met. When critical decisions need to be made that may involve multiple departments, nurses working in silos can be counterproductive and delay critical decisions. In academic health systems, the risks for working in isolation are even greater due to the systems' complex nature. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how one academic medical center in an academic health system developed a highly effective organized structured approach to an executive nursing council.