Chief Strategist's Message: CCNA's Work to Expand Nursing Education Capacity State by State is Focus of Second AJN Article

When the Center to Champion Nursing in America (CCNA) was launched in 2007, the top priority for us was expanding education capacity for nurses.

With the need for improving access to affordable and quality care for all Americans becoming more urgent each day, getting more nurses into the career and teaching pipeline was—and still is—an urgent challenge. Because education and workforce development in any field are generally coordinated locally, we immediately went to work supporting state level efforts to help grow a highly trained national nurse workforce.

What’s happening in states around the country is the subject of the second in an exciting series of articles appearing in the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) called “Uniting States, Sharing Strategies.” The first article in the series discussed the major messages that emerged from two national summits on education capacity with state teams of stakeholders; the current article, The Technical Assistance Program of the CCNA: How a national organization is helping to expand nursing education capacity state by state, drills down into the nuts and bolts of CCNA’s work with 30 state teams. The remaining articles will look in depth at five states that are exemplars in redesigning and expanding nursing education.

As someone who’s spent much of my career working at national and state levels to address the inequities in access to, and the quality of, health and long-term care, I am so pleased to see this article in print and share it with our CCNA blog readers. I have directed national initiatives that provided states with incentives to help consumers of all ages live in their homes and communities and still receive quality health care. As director of a national technical assistance center created to assist states and U.S. territories re-design their long-term care systems, I know first-hand the importance of sharing strategies, and CCNA is well positioned to serve as a conduit for this technical assistance program as we work to support expanding education capacity for nurses. In this article, my co-authors (and valued colleagues) and I detail CCNA’s efforts to support 30 geographically diverse state teams in expanding nursing education capacity through our Technical Assistance Program. The program is designed to support states that are finding solutions to their nurse shortage, and help other states adapt and build on the experiences of those that have found success.

From the rigorous process of selecting the original 18 lead state teams to site visits, evaluations and the all important mechanics of facilitating communications among the 30 teams, this article describes how CCNA is implementing its vision of a national movement to increase awareness of the need to expand nursing education capacity and support the changes required for success.