High-quality nursing care is linked to improved patient experience and patient outcomes, so having work environments that nurture a culture of nursing excellence is fundamental to delivering high-quality patient care. The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) runs the Pathway to Excellence programme, an international accreditation recognising healthcare organisations that provide nurses with a positive and safe practice environment in which they can excel. In 2020, Nottingham Children’s Hospital became the first children’s hospital in Europe to gain Pathway to Excellence accreditation, demonstrating that it has developed a culture of nursing excellence and a positive environment for nurses to work in. This article describes the hospital’s journey towards accreditation. Crucial to its success were strategic planning, transformational leadership and using a change management approach, as well as effective staff engagement guided by the ADKAR model for change, an acronym representing five individual outcomes in terms of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement.
Nursing Management. 28, 6, 29-35. doi: 10.7748/nm.2021.1980
Correspondence Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software
Conflict of interestJoseph Charles Manning is a current recipient of an NIHR HEE funded ICA Clinical Lectureship. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. All authors conceptualised and designed the Pathway to Excellence project and were involved in its implementation, and contributed to the drafting, critical review and revision of the manuscript.
AcknowledgementsThe authors acknowledge the nursing staff at Nottingham Children’s Hospital for their engagement, support and resilience to achieve and maintain Pathway to Excellence accreditation. The accreditation process was funded by the Nottingham Hospitals Charity.
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