The Nurse Executive Council (NEC) is the backbone of nursing professional governance at UCLA Health. By design, the systemwide council provides equitable representation from leaders in every sector of nursing, while also providing oversight of system outcomes.
“Our goal is to ensure alignment of professional-governance activities while maintaining consideration for our organizational strategic priorities at the system and facility levels,” says Megan Weisbart, MSN, RNC-NIC, CNL, PHN, a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center and chair of the NEC. “We are the main hub that ensures execution of professional-governance decisions that impact nursing and nursing excellence, promoting staff empowerment and patient outcomes.”
Through a bi-directional communication structure that flows from the Unit Practice Councils to the facility-level Transformational Leadership Council, the system-level Transformational Leadership Collaborative and the Nurse Executive Council, and back again, every nurse at UCLA Health can have a voice.
The NEC meets monthly, and also holds an annual multiday Nursing Strategic Planning Retreat in which leaders from the professional-governance councils meet with executive leadership and mentors to outline strategic goals for the coming fiscal year.
The NEC held its planning retreat in August 2023. Feedback was gathered from each council to better understand their concerns and needs, Weisbart explains. “From that, the goal was to combine those findings and observe opportunities for improvement within each council, and also the outcomes each council was interested in measuring,” she says. “We asked councils to brainstorm how, based on that feedback, they would like their councils to look. We also asked them to identify any stakeholders that would be key to turning their ideas into a success, and then to identify any metrics. Additionally, we wanted councils to outline their proposed scope.”
Weisbart says much of the NEC’s decision making this fiscal year has stemmed from feedback received in the strategic-planning meeting. “What we’ve been doing this whole first half of our fiscal year is honing in on the appropriate mentors for each council, identifying who their organizational partners should be and who will provide oversight for what outcomes,” she says.
One of the more eye-opening discoveries from the planning meeting was the amount of duplicative work being done, Weisbart says. “With any professional-governance structure, it can be easy to slip into working in silos within your own councils,” she notes. “A big goal for us this year is to improve communication between councils so that we can streamline the effectiveness of our work and reduce duplicative work. And all of those things are going to advance nursing excellence, promote staff empowerment and enhance patient-care outcomes, as well.”
Work of the Nurse Executive Council over the past year has also included:
- Developing an executive council subgroup to update the professional-governance bylaws
- Creating a single graphic that displays updated elements of Nursing’s professional-governance model
- Continuing to monitor nurse-sensitive indicators and quality performance
Weisbart shares that the strength of the NEC lies in its knowledgeable leaders, teamwork and diversity of ideas and perspectives. “We’ve made it a huge priority this year to bring the voices of our bedside nurses up through our professional-governance structure, and then up to the Nurse Executive Council. In this way, we can work on better communication, streamlining our work, reducing workloads and ensuring we can hear the voices of everyone,” Weisbart says.
