Judith Shamian

• International Council of Nurses

This chapter links the community resilience approach and healthcare services during emergencies, especially from the nursing perspective, and the implementation of the SDGs. The chapter portrays the development of the resilience paradigm. It describes the framework of the Conjoint Community Resilience Assessment Measure (CCRAM) with a focus on the...

The purpose of this consensus paper was to convene leaders and scholars from eight Expert Panels of the American Academy of Nursing and provide recommendations to advance nursing's roles and responsibility to ensure universal access to palliative care. On behalf of the Academy, these evidence-based recommendations will guide nurses, policy makers,...

The purpose of this consensus paper was to convene leaders and scholars from eight Expert Panels of the American Academy of Nursing and provide recommendations to advance nursing's roles and responsibility to ensure universal access to palliative care. Part I of this consensus paper herein provides the rationale and background to support the policy...

Aims To reveal factors associated with nurses’ professional commitment during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Background During the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the Nursing‐Division at the Israeli Ministry of Health and partners conducted a study to examine nurses’ perceptions towards a set of personal and professional circumstances that may affect...

The association between health and community resilience is well established in the literature. However, maintaining continuity of healthcare services during emergencies, and their contribution in the context of community resiliency have not been sufficiently studied. This study aims to explore the relationship between the public’s confidence in the...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was implemented on January 1, 2016 and is composed of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and further delineated by 169 targets. This article offers background information on the 2030 Agenda as it relates to nursing and midwifery, professional organizational initiatives currently advanc...

Introduction Nurses’ broad knowledge and treatment skills are instrumental to disaster management. Roles, responsibilities, and practice take on additional dimensions to their regular roles during these times. Despite this crucial position, the literature indicates a gap between their actual work in emergencies and the investment in training and es...

Aim To examine predictors of Canadian new graduate nurses’ health outcomes over 1 year. Design A time‐lagged mail survey was conducted. Method New graduate nurses across Canada (N = 406) responded to a mail survey at two time points: November 2012–March 2013 (Time 1) and May–July 2014 (Time 2). Multiple linear regression (mental and overall healt...

Background: Despite its achievements in decreasing HIV prevalence and under-five mortality, Zambia still faces high maternal and neonatal mortality, particularly in the rural and remote areas where almost 60% of the population resides. After significant investments in developing its community health system, the Zambian Ministry of Health was inter...

Focusing on the UN High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, this paper examines its potential impact on primary health-care to communities. It contains a set of curated interviews with key decision-makers who are determining how health workers are trained and employed all over the world. The commentaries come from individuals...

Aim: To describe new graduate nurses' transition experiences in Canadian healthcare settings by exploring the perspectives of new graduate nurses and nurse leaders in unit level roles. Background: Supporting successful transition to practice is key to retaining new graduate nurses in the workforce and meeting future demand for healthcare service...

It's time to reach beyond the bedside.

Judith Shamian explains why nurses are ideally placed to join the global push for healthier lives and greater wellbeing, and why the 'nursing voice' must be developed, promoted and, above all, heard around the world.

There is a limited understanding of the significance and the potential contribution that nursing can make through practice, policy, science, and profession to the global health agenda. In this article, we present some of the evidence to demonstrate the clinical, social, and economic returns on investment in nursing. We conclude by addressing the is...

Background: As the nursing profession ages, new graduate nurses are an invaluable health human resource. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate factors influencing new graduate nurses' successful transition to their full professional role in Canadian hospital settings and to determine predictors of job and career satisfaction a...

Judith Shamian, President of the International Council of Nurses, looks back over 2015 and considers how nurses across the world can address the challenges ahead.

Home care is the fastest growing segment of the Canadian healthcare system, yet research on patient safety has been conducted predominantly in institutional settings. This is a case example of how Victorian Order of Nurses Canada, a national not-for-profit home and community care provider, embedded a nurse researcher to create an environment in whi...

We know from rigorous evidence that nurses can exert an incredible impact on the everyday lives of people and their health. Nurses can also contribute in much wider spheres of influence by applying their knowledge and skills to address broader issues affecting population health across communities, nations and globally. Despite the prevalence of so...

Only one-third of the healthcare's service values comes from its capital assets: buildings, equipment, supplies etc. The balance is in human capital. So it is important to ask: what kind of job are we doing?

In the lead essay, Oliver differentiates between utilizing incentives to motivate single simple behaviour changes (e.g., getting immunizations, undergoing screening tests) and using them to motivate sustained behaviour changes (e.g., losing weight, quitting smoking). This commentary focuses on the latter. Here, the authors talk about four main poin...

Discussion on implementation of the Excellent Care for all Act, 2010 (ECFA Act), Bill 46, has focused on the hospital sector in Ontario, but it also has relevance outside the hospital setting. As primary healthcare, long-term care and home care all receive public funding, these sectors should be expected to be compliant with Bill 46. But does the a...

One of the major themes uncovered by Graham and Sibbald in their analysis of the 50-year-old issues of Hospital Administration in Canada (HAC) is the evolution of nursing. However, the HAC approach 50 years ago was that nursing was a problem to be solved, not a resource for health, the health system and the public, and that image would stay with nu...

The current healthcare system is slowly evolving into a new system built on a vision of health promotion, primary care and community-based home care, with hospitals still being a core pillar of the healthcare system but not its primary service. This transformation requires a new approach to practice, namely, Strengths-Based Nursing Care (SBC). SBC...

Concerns related to the complex issue of nursing turnover continue to challenge healthcare leaders in every sector of health care. Voluntary nurse turnover is shown to be influenced by a myriad of inter-related factors, and there is increasing evidence of its negative effects on nurses, patients and health care organizations. The objectives were to...

In response to "Evidence-Based Policy Prescription for an Aging Population," by Chappell and Hollander, this paper proposes that efforts be made to execute strategies to build the political momentum and public support necessary for concrete action toward achieving the recommended policies. It also suggests the implementation of knowledge translatio...

This article provides an overview of current research on older workers with caregiving responsibilities from Canadian perspective. The first section presents relevant demographic and policy trends. The second section outlines impacts of these trends on caregiving employees, communities, employers, businesses and governments. The third section ident...

The face of the healthcare CEO has been changing over the past decade, during which we have seen the emergence of a new breed in upper management, the clinician executive. These are healthcare professionals who have often held previous leadership positions, such as chief nursing officer or VP of medicine, and whose career path has seen them progres...

As part of a large study of nursing turnover in Canadian hospitals, the present study focuses on the impact and key determinants of nurse turnover and implications for management strategies in nursing units. Nursing turnover is an issue of ever-increasing priority as work-related stress and job dissatisfaction are influencing nurses' intention to l...

This commentary by Victorian Order of Nurses Canada, written in response to "Getting What We Pay For? The Value-for-Money Challenge," by McGrail, Zierler and Ip, answers four key questions about Canada's home and community care sector: (1) What are our objectives? (2) Where do we achieve good value now? (3) Where and why are we failing? and (4) Wha...

Within Canada's fast-paced, ever-changing healthcare environment, providers are experiencing difficulty practising according to their professional ethical standards, leading many to experience moral or ethical distress. Limited attention has been paid to improvements in the ethical climate in healthcare settings in research focusing on nurses' work...

In order to understand the tapestry of care in the home, we need to realize that in addition to regulated staff providing care, home support workers, volunteers and family and friend caregivers provide essential support to the frail, disabled and chronically ill. In their article "Employers, Home Support Workers and Elderly Clients Reveal Key Issue...

The purpose of this study was to describe the profile of nursing leadership structures in Canada and to assess relationships among structures, processes and outcomes pertaining to nurse leaders' work. Data were collected from nurse leaders in 28 academic health centres and 38 community hospitals in 10 Canadian provinces (n = 1,164). The results of...

Recent experience with the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Canada and the global threat of the H5N1 virus (avian "flu") have increased the appetite for and urgency of pandemic planning as a policy issue. The healthcare setting is one of the most important areas to prepare for such an event, and it is crucial that discussions...

CareNet is an interactive Web-based system intended to support informal caregivers (ordinary citizens who are engaged in providing residential healthcare to their families and friends). The design of CareNet uses concepts from a number of areas including: Communities of Practice, software engineering, content authoring, and knowledge management to...

The World Health Report launched the Health Workforce Decade (2006-2015), with high priority given for countries to develop effective workforce strategies including healthy workplaces for health workers. Evidence shows that healthy workplaces improve recruitment and retention, workers' health and well-being, quality of care and patient safety, orga...

As this issue goes to print, the Findings from the 2005 National Survey of the Work and Health of Nurses(2006) has been released by Statistics Canada, Health Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). This is the first ever national survey of the work and health of nurses. This work was undertaken to provide a national perspec...

The article describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of an instrument to measure patients’ perceptions of learning needs at time of discharge from hospital to home Evaluation of the Patient Learning Needs Scale was based on responses of 301 adults hospitalized with a medical or surgical illness Factor analysis isolated seven su...

Caring for an individual in the home is inherently complex. The physical environment, family dynamics and the cognitive abilities of the client and family members are only a few of the factors to be considered in delivering services. Although targeted initiatives have been established to reduce preventable injuries and deaths in the hospital sector...

Research about the economic impact of nurse turnover has been compromised by a lack of consistent definitions and measurement. This article describes a study that was designed to refine a methodology to examine the costs associated with nurse turnover. Nursing unit managers responded to a survey that contained items relating to budgeted full-time e...

Ongoing instability in the nursing workforce is raising questions globally about the issue of nurse turnover. A comprehensive literature review was undertaken to examine the current state of knowledge about the scope of the nurse turnover problem, definitions of turnover, factors considered to be determinants of nurse turnover, turnover costs and t...

Wait times and the wait times agenda are on the Canadian schedule. Although most Canadians support our healthcare system, they are concerned about access. Resolving the wait times agenda might help increase Canadian confidence in the system's ability to provide timely access to care. While the paper by Trypuc, MacLeod and Hudson demonstrates well h...

In 2003, over 13,000 Ontario nurses were surveyed to explore how they evaluated their hospital work environments and their responses to these practice environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare these nurses' evaluations and responses. Sixty-five percent of nurses who were mailed surveys completed and returned a survey. Signi...

The aim of this descriptive study was to help policy- and decision-makers enhance the health of the Canadian nursing workforce by highlighting key factors of concern and exploring options for collecting and utilizing nurses' health data. This paper describes the views of 62 nursing stakeholders from a diverse spectrum of professional, labour, manag...

A longitudinal predictive design was used to test a model linking changes in structural and psychological empowerment to changes in job satisfaction. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed a good fit of the data from 185 randomly selected staff nurses to the hypothesized model. Changes in perceived structural empowerment had direct effects...

To determine factors contributing to high registered nurse (RN) injury claim rates in Canadian hospitals. Cross-sectional study of secondary 1998-99 data for RNs (N = 8,044) in Ontario, Canada, linked at the hospital level (n = 127). Descriptive statistics, correlations, and logistic regression analyses were conducted. The odds of a high RN lost-ti...

States Canadian governments have, after a decade of health care downsizing, started to focus on issues of health human resources. Posits that nurses in particular experience higher rates of absenteeism and injury than other types of Canadian workers. Advocates that this study’s findings offers numerous ideas to managers of the system, unions, nurse...

There is a global nursing shortage. Few health services decision makers have made the critical link between the number of human resources, the characteristics of the work environment and the impact on patients, nurses, and the system as a whole. The purpose of this article is to review evidence about nurse workload, staffing, skill mix, turnover, a...

Reorganization of nurses' work has raised questions about the effects of working conditions on their health. Nurses, for example, are more likely to miss work because of illness and disability than employees in other occupations. The overall purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the feasibility of using existing Statistics Canada sur...

The key to climbing Mount Everest is not one individual striving for the peak. Teamwork, leadership, and meticulous planning are what take climbers to the summit. They are key, as well, to solving the problems of human resources in the healthcare system.

A predictive, nonexperimental design was used to test Kanter's work empowerment theory in a random sample of 412 Canadian staff nurses. Empowered individuals reported higher affective commitment and work satisfaction. Moreover, empowered employees experienced greater organizational trust, which in turn influenced these job attitudes. Since research...

The primary purpose of this study is to document the psychometric properties of the revised Nursing Work Index (NWI-R) in the context of a large Canadian sample of registered nurses. A self-administered survey containing the NWI-R was completed by 17,965 registered nurses working in 415 hospitals in three Canadian provinces. Using exploratory princ...

A longitudinal design was used to test Kanter's (1977) work empowerment theory in a random sample of185 staff nurses. Kanter argues that work environments which provide access to information, support, resources, and opportunity to learn and develop are empowering and influence employee work attitudes and organizational effectiveness. A model linkin...

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between hospital-level indicators of the work environment and aggregated indicators of health and well-being amongst registered nurses working in acute-care hospitals in Ontario, Canada. This ecological analysis used data from a self-reported survey instrument randomly allocated to nurses us...

The amount and frequency of change affecting the health care industry makes management of a work environment particularly challenging for nursing leaders Numerous studies are discussed that explore the influence of organization behavior and issues of staff perception on measurable outcomes such as nurse retention and patient satisfaction. The autho...

Job strain among staff nurses has become an increasingly important concern in relationship to employee performance and commitment to the organization in current restructured healthcare settings. The purpose of this study was to test Karasek's Demands-Control Model of job strain by examining the extent to which the degree of job strain in nursing wo...

In this study, we tested an expanded model of Kanter's structural empowerment, which specified the relationships among structural and psychological empowerment, job strain, and work satisfaction. Strategies proposed in Kanter's empowerment theory have the potential to reduce job strain and improve employee work satisfaction and performance in curre...

The current nursing shortage, high hospital nurse job dissatisfaction, and reports of uneven quality of hospital care are not uniquely American phenomena. This paper presents reports from 43,000 nurses from more than 700 hospitals in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Germany in 1998-1999. Nurses in countries with distinctly differen...

The current nursing shortage, high hospital nurse job dissatisfac- tion, and reports of uneven quality of hospital care are not uniquely American phenomena. This paper presents reports from 43,000 nurses from more than 700 hospitals in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Germany in 1998-1999. Nurses in countries with distinctly differ...

This body of research explores the influence of structural and psychological empowerment in the work-place on a nurse's percep-tion of job strain and work satisfaction. Previous research has demonstrated the personal, operational, and financial effects of job strain ranging from absenteeism to work-er's compensation and work-place violence. Structu...

A predictive, nonexperimental design was used to test Kanter's work empowerment theory in a random sample of 412 staff nurses selected from the professional registry list of a central Canadian province. Kanter argues that work environments that provide access to information, support, resources, and opportunity to learn and develop are empowering an...