Dear Colleagues:

As I reflect on my first year as chief nursing officer and senior vice president for Patient Care Services at BWH, there is much that we have accomplished and yet more needs to be done. This has been an energizing year for me. I am proud to be your chief nurse and to be a senior member of the hospital leadership team. As the leader of a clinical discipline and administrative leader within the organization, my role is to align the goals of the professional discipline of nursing with the mission and goals of BWH.

As a profession, our work together is to refine and strengthen the care to patients and to continue to develop our practice. We know the most significant indicator of the patient’s overall hospital experience is the quality of the nurse-patient relationship. When nurses are confident and highly competent in their practice, patients feel known and cared for, care is efficient and effective and errors are reduced—all factors which contribute greatly to creating the safest environment and to our success.

Having a superb nursing practice at BWH is the result of many things: the unbending commitment to excellence on the part of clinical nurses who deliver care to our patients and their families; the presence of strong and highly accountable nursing leadership to support clinical work and create environments where expert practice can flourish; the fair and intelligent allocation of resources; and the building of infrastructure through which our vision of providing excellent care to patients and families with the best staff in the safest environment can be achieved.

This issue of BWH Nurse describes one important piece of this infrastructure, the Center for Nursing Excellence. Our vision for the center is to bring together the best work in nursing education, research and professional development to support clinical nursing practice at BWH. I hope you will find this informative and that it will stimulate your ideas for ways to strengthen and further develop your own practice. Our collective practice at BWH is only as strong as the individual nurses who make it up.

I want to thank you again for the opportunity you have given me to be the leader of this extraordinary practice community. As I enter my second year in this role, I will continue to work hard every day to earn the privilege of guiding nurses at BWH in our very important work of providing excellent care to patients and families.

Sincerely,

Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN

Chief Nursing Officer and

Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services