Nursing's Path to Excellence

Abstract

Members of the NLN Board of Governors fully engage in the crucial conversations, ask the important questions, work synergistically on ideas to make 1 + 1 = 3, and accomplish extraordinary work on behalf of our members and our profession. Like nurse faculty across the nation, they volunteer to take on difficult tasks, and they make time to do what needs to be done. THERE IS MUCH TO CELEBRATE in our 114th year as the National League for Nursing gathers at the Education Summit 2007 in Phoenix. At this largest of all nursing education conferences, we celebrate the more than 70 percent of all nurse educators who are shaping the future of nursing and nursing education as NLN members. We celebrate also the inaugural class of fellows of the Academy of Nursing Education; our certified nurse educator colleagues, who now represent 48 states; our NLN Centers of Excellence; the work to secure our future accomplished by the NLN Foundation for Nursing Education; and the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission's continued recognition by the Department of Education. What we less frequently discuss is the heroic work of the country's nurse educators, who nearly doubled the number of RN graduates from schools of nursing in five years, from 68,759 first-time NCLEX candidates in 2001 to 136,621 in 2006. According to data from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the first two quarters of 2007 have shown a 12 percent increase over 2006! This extraordinary accomplishment happened in more than 1800 different ways, corresponding with the number of schools of nursing in the United States. Certainly, the strategic work of Johnson & Johnson encouraged many of the best and brightest American students to choose nursing. However, there was no one formula, approach, or algorithm that enabled nursing programs to recruit, retain, teach, and graduate all of these students. Therefore, we must ask, how did this increase happen? School by school, during many long faculty meetings, creative nurse faculty asked two strategic questions: What can we do? How can we do it? With their efforts, these resourceful individuals rewrote history. Bolstered by the many constituent leagues for nursing that provide the crucible where ideas for nursing education are shared, nursing has once again done what others would believe to be impossible. In working with the NLN Board of Governors over the past four years, I have had the wonderful opportunity to see firsthand how nurses and our public members do the impossible. The NLN consistently elects the most extraordinary people as governors. …