Triangle Synergies in a National Quality and Safety Education Initiative in Nursing

A number of features of the initiative and its program elements served to highlight and provide incentives for the kind of triangle synergies. This chapter explores forces that diminish the extent to which nurses take into account each point of the triangle as they work in separate spheres toward separate and unlinked aims. It describes quality and safety education for nurses (QSEN) goals and strategies and examples of the initiative’s initial impact on nursing education, licensure, and accreditation of nursing programs. The personal careers and commitments of QSEN leaders influenced the strategies designed to create synergy between improvements in professional development, patient/population health, and system performance. One of the most effective strategies, in terms of developing nurses’ capacity for boundary-spanning leadership, was the design of the QSEN Learning Collaborative. From the start, one of the 10 QSEN leaders was chosen specifically because of her expertise in fostering interprofessional learning related to quality improvement.