Overview
On October 7-9, 2009, eighty-seven participants representing 42 different organizations making up a wide range of stakeholders in the nursing certification community - consumer advocates, researchers, specialty organizations, associations, educators, state boards, and testing organizations - gathered for the Nursing Certification and Competency Summit in Baltimore, MD. The purpose of this Summit was to develop a unified, international research agenda for nursing certification.
Planning for the Research Summit began with the identification and validation of the important themes in nursing certification. Seven themes were developed after a thorough review of the literature available as well as a review of the output from previous Summits hosted by CCI. In March, 2009 18 people representing the ABNS Research Committee, this Summit's Sponsor Group and a group of experts met to validate the initial set of 7 research themes. Through a series of facilitated exercises, the members of the planning group clarified and consolidated the themes into four research priorities:
- The relationship between certification and patient outcomes.
- Continuing competence in nursing.
- The relationship between the health care work environment and certification/certified practice.
- Stakeholder understanding of certification and perceived value of certification.
Using these Research Priorities, this Summit consisted of a series of facilitated activities that focused participants on identifying research projects that best supported the Research Priorities, and then designing the processes, tools, structures and funding mechanisms necessary to support this Research Agenda.
As part of this process the participants decided that ABNS should take a prominent role in managing the work of the Research Agenda going forward. A team developed a proposal for participants to take to their respective Boards to request the endorsement and support of the participating organizations. Another team developed a draft of the Research Agenda itself. Those documents will be finalized and distributed in the coming weeks.
At the end of the session, the participants expressed tremendous gratitude to ABNS and the design team that worked with InnovationLabs to develop the activities in the Summit. InnovationLabs would like to thank the sponsors and the entire participant group for the trust and enthusiasm they showed throughout the Summit.
Real Time Record
This web site is a record of the event in Baltimore as it happened - captured in real time and presented here in this web site. The documentation of the session includes the assignments each group was asked to work on and the results they produced. There are photos of the white walls developed by the participants. The large group conversations were documented in text and images as well. The documenation was captured throughout the course of each day of the session and is chronological (in the order that things happened). The text is not a transcription of the large group conversations. Rather, it represents the documentor's synthesis of what was being discussed.
This record is intended to be a reminder to the participants of the conversations that took place during the retreat, to serve as a stimulus for further conversation and to serve as an artifact of the group's work.
For anyone who was not present at the event reading this, you may lose some of the energy and creativity the participants expressed - and some of the ideas may not translate completely without that context. If you have any questions about the content or anything that is represented here please speak to someone that participated in the process or contact Dr. Melissa Biel at 562.496.2462 or Michael Kaufman at 510.903.0652.
Images
Photographs of participants and their work are included throughout the Real Time Record. To view a larger version of a marker board or poster, click on the thumbnail image. The larger image will open in a new window.