Final Work
Report Out
Team 6 - Marketing: Consumer
We had a couple of points here. Simply everything needs to be tied back to the vision, mission and various success markers of ABNS. We need to clearly have in mind what we want and who to do what. If we know how we want a particular stakenolder to feel, then we know what kind of marketing we need to do.
We are tempting people in authority to pay for their staff members, to encourage it, to use it as a promotional tool. If that is our goal, then we have to know what’s important to our target audience. The problem is scarcity so we have to have focus. Targeting is how we deal with it.
In some studies, I see a variety of things proposed but I think we need to make sure that these are things that make a difference to our target audience.
On teams 6 and 12, we divided up the groups’ mission between consumers and employers.
We identified the target audience and then organized them by various criteria to make messages that will drive those audiences. We need the research necessary to support those messages and then use them where more appropriate, whether it is a whitepaper, a presentation, or working with lobbyists. We want to make sure that every certified nurse has something in their hands to share the good message.
We looked at a variety of audiences. The most important groups are the healthcare advocacy groups, patients, the policy makers, and insurance companies. We looked at the value levers and came up with appropriate things for each audience. These include the best care, accessibility and degree of impact, recognition by employers and colleagues, re-election and public opinion. For the insurance companies, ROI is probably the most important. This list isn’t complete but it’s a good start.
These are our best guesses from some very intelligent people from our group, but we need to validate these assumptions. Probably that could be done fairly simply. Once that is validated then we have good assurance that we’re doing the right stuff.
It would be valuable to find out the opinions on certification among the employer community but it will be expensive. I think we should be telling people what they should think instead of spending resources to find out what they do think.
Comments
I think we have sung to the choir for too many years. We have marketed to ourselves for too long. Our numbers are up and we have more certificants than ever before. I do think it’s time to market to the people who can influence this. Some years ago my organization did a white paper and we wish we would have done standards instead. It would have been more powerful.
Different organizations may have different needs and priorities.
There is some literature out there that says any registered nurse that graduates can’t expect to specialize in anything. I think this is where we can make a difference.
Team 12 - Marketing: Employer
We went through a similar process that the other team went through. We’re going to have to validate our assumptions as well.
We started talking about what matters to employers and what we think might be important to them. The value of certification to this particular audience needs to be considered. We can use the data and result to have an outlet for speaking about it.
Once the research has been completed, then we can come up with a marketing plan that is tied to these audiences. The studies that would be talked about would accomplish that.
Our main points follow a similar pattern to Rob’s.
Comments
Is the intent to have a press release or some kind of statement about what went on here for the last two days so that people can take it back to their respective organizations?
Yes, the post-event plan that will involve a press release that talks about the future of the research.
Team 2 - Database
The database would contain all certificates and information about all current as well as inactive information as well as all demographic information. This would include advance practitioners as well. It would include which states they had licensure in. This would have specialty, pre-specialty information as well as recent certifications.
The purpose of this is to create the future of the certified nurse and instead of needing to check 14,000 people you could just get information by having the databases talk to each other and it would pop up with information about any actions that had been taken against that certification. You could know whether there was good or poor care done at a particular hospital.
It will be funded by some research grants. We thought that the specialty organizations could kick in to this because they will be saved some time and money by using the database.
Individual certificants might also add a bit to this. We haven’t raised fees in 12 years so maybe we could add something to that. We could make a fee for people to use the database.
It needs to be updated on a regular basis. It would be good to have an incentive for each nurse to keep their information updated. It could be either positive or negative incentive for them to keep their information up to date.
There are financial implications because maybe your organization gets some benefit from the database. The level of access and disclosure might be a legal concern in different states so that has to be taken into consideration.
The model needs to be self-supportive. If it is a requirement for certification, that might be an incentive.
Comments
There is no unduplicated nurses’ database. Some states now have a way to stop licensing if you haven’t paid your child support. We can’t require a social security number.
I don’t think this is legal. It is too much information and it costs too much. We need to keep this information in house. It would be duplication of efforts and I think the potential for research is there but I’m not sure how much it is going to be used. This is very costly and is a huge effort and expense.
I can imagine a number of compelling benefits that accrue by having a centralized portal but I recognize there are a lot of difficulties, technical and legal and more. At the risk at jumping prematurely to solutions, do people know about the travel aggregation site, kayak.com? You type in what you want and it goes out to multiple databases and aggregates what you want. Maybe we could have a system like that instead of building an entire database from scratch? You don’t have to keep guessing. It might be useful to know what has been done in other states.
We all agree that some type of way to aggregate data is important. We know we don’t have enough information to make a decision, but we need to know where we’re going to put this. If we agree that we want to move this forward then we could take a next step.
Team 4 - Support for ABNS
We need to develop a separate 501c3 organization and it would have the same function. It would have a board of trustees which would be representative of member organizations but not just the regular ones. We would only need a research committee to come in when necessary. They would come in and then disperse.
We would have a development director and we would have to bring on someone with skills. We wonder whether we could charge a dollar more on the certificates and put that money towards this effort? We could do a sliding scale as we do now.
We would hope to bring in money to build an endowment. We want a skilled individual who could bring the money in. This would be after we put out the RFPs.
We talked about the marketing piece. We have listed out the number of hours we expect this new staff would have.
Comments
Q: Is the 501c3 designed with the purpose to be grant eligible?
A: Yes and also for some IRS requirements.
Team 5 - How all groups can participate
We first did a brainstorm about participation and considered that to be very broad. We listed all our ideas. In case you can’t read them, I will read them all out loud to you.
We have a whole lot of groups who could do these things in different ways. There is a lot of overlap but we wanted to be more comprehensive than not. We have listed a lot of numbers here that shows you our prioritization and which groups we think could participate in each of these activities.
Comments
This is very thorough. These kinds of research questions are rising across disciplines, so great work.
Team 1 - Research agenda
This is summative in nature. We wrote out what the research agenda really is. Our activities include promoting research that investigates the contribution of nursing certification to healthcare.
We organized around the priorities - patient outcomes, continual competence and work environment. We want to drive improvements for certification and recertification processes. We would use the data for developing a consensus on definitions and measurements.
Perhaps this is the beginning of an outline for the research agenda and next steps.
Melissa is going to finish this document soon and send this out to all of you.
Comments
We started out with the four things and I want to know if we didn’t lose sight of the stakeholder understanding.
It’s definitely not lost but something we consider more about marketing at this point.
Team 3 - Message to the Boards
We want to frame a proposal that we could take back to our respective boards. We’re not finished because we needed to hear the reports from these other teams.
We want to set context for the boards. We want to say how we got here and the ABNS’ role in all of this. The focus of the dialogue is on the four priorities that were validated over the last year and at this meeting.
Through an innovative and instructional design process we came up with three projects: recertification, patient outcomes, and critical thinking. We outlined some projects under stakeholder understanding but it became that these were marketing concerns and ABNS will incorporate those from a marketing campaign. There is a need for aggregation and more investigation required for a database project.
You are going to be the voice to your boards. The benefits allow individual organizations to pursue the research agenda that they otherwise couldn’t pursue on their own.
There are some gaps in this because we don’t know specifically what the call for action is, but there is an idea to create a 501c3, and to have an ongoing research committee. We are unclear yet about what it costs.
The request for this needs to be expedited because most organizations are now in the 2010 budget cycles. People need to understand that this request may be for ongoing support.
Some of the additional documents we’ll provide are the participant list, the link to the real-time report, the pre-event document, and the research agenda document.
Comments
The outcomes of the research are more than what we need to change and the organizations can also benefit from that.
This will be linked to both the InnovationLabs website and the ABNS and CCI websites.
One thing that will be forthcoming is that there will be a request for money and I want to put that out there now. I don’t know how we’re going to do that but it will probably come from the ABNS board.
I think the board can have some quick dialogue for potential funding and come back with an idea soon. It’s unrealistic to know what the amount needed is now.
It might be helpful to have your boards put some money aside in anticipation of this request coming.
Why not just make up a number and adjust it later?
How about $200k for the start up effort? If you look at it from a sliding scale I think that the board can come up with something in a range of $550 on the low end and a cap of $10k on the high end. I don’t think we need to panic over this amount of money but see this as an investment.
If the organization wants to do an in kind contribution, such as a lawyer or researcher, that would be considered a very valuable give and appreciated.
Team 7 - Project: patient outcomes
Our principles guiding the process are to a commission a “think tank” with several outcome researchers and certification nursing experts. We want to use the tightest and strongest research design whenever possible.
We want to potentially look at having a mediator or moderator. We want to have richer study findings.
The priorities are cost, time to conduct a study, research question and focus of the study, cost/benefit, and the likelihood of finding associations.
Comments
Q: Would it be helpful to compile a list of researchers?
A: Maybe.
Team 10 - Proejct: critical thinking skills
We thought that the basic question is how we move on from where most people agreed. The beginning point is to start a literature review which is very robust. We want to come to the research group and come to a consensus. Once we agreed on that, we would come up with a toolbox with various instruments to measure this, such as the PPCS and the Kolb and perhaps situational judgment.
We would put out a call for critical thinking research using the definition with the instruments.
Comments
I would be curious if there is a correlation between scoring high on a critical thinking test and those who pass or fail the certification.
Team 11 - Project: Recertification
This group worked on identifying strengths and weaknesses of different recertification methods and the assessment of continuing competency. Our objectives are to put a process in place for ongoing currency and a position statement addressing continuing competency and the role of recertification.
We want to know what the definition of competency is and put a toolkit out there.
We also want to have some guidelines that are user-friendly. We also want this to be sustainable. The people in our small group said they would be able to continue working on this so we all signed up to do that.
Potential funding might be found with a couple of foundations we’ve listed here.
Comments
It might be helpful to have a link on the ANBS web site about that along with the information about the toolkit and process.
We would need a PI to coordinate this as well as a research team who could help with simulations and identify the strengths and weaknesses. This is very specialized in the various areas of assessment.