Building the Leadership Development Pipeline: A 5-Step Succession Planning Model

摘要

The demand for registered nurses, especially advanced practice nurses (APNs), will continue to grow over the next decades. This trend will coexist along with society's increasing demand for healthcare services. As the US baby boomer population ages and lives longer, this will create a greater need for well-educated healthcare professionals such as APNs. Advanced practice nurses, especially clinical nurse specialists (CNSs), will continue to play an important role in providing care to the increasingly burgeoning US population well beyond 2020. Despite the increasing demand for nurses, a severe nursing and faculty shortage will continue to hamper the ability to meet society's need for nursing services. Of paramount concern will be issues of care quality and safety, areas in which CNSs contribute significant expertise.Anticipating the growing need for CNSs in the future, the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists embarked on a campaign to increase the number of CNSs in the United States. Specifically, the Clinical Nurse Specialist Foundation (CNSF) determined its top priority for 2006-2008 to be increasing the number of nurses entering CNS graduate programs, including PhD programs. The CNSF identified 3 strategies to achieve this overarching objective: (1) promoting awareness of CNS practice to potential CNS students; (2) providing scholarships to CNS students in master's and PhD programs; and (3) determining CNS workforce needs by specialty practice, practice setting, and geographic location.The 3 CNSF strategies focus primarily on the CNS workforce from the perspective of attracting individuals into CNS practice and then supporting them through their formal educational preparation. One strategy that bears concurrent pursuit, however, is the need to build successionplanning programs that not only attract but also retain engaged CNSs and keep them reinvigorated throughout their professional careers. Because many CNSs work in hospital settings, this warrants the following question: What succession planning strategies can be instituted to create and sustain a high-performing cadre of CNSs in the hospital setting now and beyond 2020? The purpose of this article is to discuss the need for deliberate CNS succession planning in the hospital setting and to introduce a useful succession planning model that incorporates strategies to cultivate current and future CNS leaders.