Leadership Through Scholarly Dissemination: The NYP Nursing Experience

Abstract

Nurse leaders are consistently called upon to demonstrate their communication skills. In fact, excellence in communication is requisite for the leadership role. Yet the translation of day-to-day communication skills to the dissemination of nursing scholarship has not been a consistent part of the culture of nursing within our health care institutions. Although there are a number of reports of workshops to develop nurses' writing skills, the practice is not widespread, most especially workshops offered for frontline clinical nurses. The systematic review conducted by Derouin and colleagues1 indicated that between 2003 and 2014, there were reports of 17 programs, with only 9 of these offered for practicing nurses. The format of the program almost always included a writing for publication workshop followed by one-to-one or small-group mentoring for enhancing writing skills of participants. The yield, that is, the number of manuscripts submitted and/or published varied from program to program but ranged from 25% to 82% success.2,3 Main reasons for the higher yield may have been the small group size (N = 17) that participated and the use of 4 workshops over the project period. Both with the limited experiences with publication workshops for practicing nurses, and the similar workshops for nurse faculty and students, a number of strategies have been identified that promote success. These include the need to supplement workshops with one-to-one mentoring and/or coaching, provision of incentives for nurse participation, recognition of nurses' successes once they have published, and the requirement of manuscript submission from each workshop attendee.1 The current writing for publication project was launched in 2013 at NewYork Presbyterian (NYP) Hospital, which has 6 campuses, namely: Allen, Columbia University Medical Center, Lower Manhattan, Morgan Stanley Children's, Westchester, and Weill Cornell Medical Center.