A Leadership Opportunity

Abstract

Despite the availability of the political process, it has not been used optimally by nurses to improve negative issues facing the profession. This study indicates that nurses are generally not astute regarding the political process and are not significantly involved. Nurse leaders have an opportunity to educate and motivate nurses to be formidable participants in the political process, champion the healthcare agenda, and propound policy efforts to improve patient care and the nursing profession.

Measuring nurses' health policy participation: WSPPIR instrument development and psychometric evaluation

“…Some similarities exist between elements of political astuteness as measured by the Political Astuteness Inventory (Clark, 2008;Primomo & Bjorling, 2013;VandeeWaa et al, 2019)…”

“…Efforts to understand how nurses participate in health policy have been evident in the nursing literature for decades. Concepts studied vary from political participation (Hanley, 1987), to public policy involvement (Oden et al, 2000), to organized political participation (Cramer, 2002;Vandenhouten et al, 2011), to political astuteness (Primomo & Bjorling, 2013;VandeeWaa et al, 2019). As can be seen in Box 1, despite a lack of agreement about the concepts to study and terminology to address nurses' involvement in policy and advocacy, there is a growing body of literature addressing ways to conceptualize and measure nurses' health policy participation globally.…”

“…• Political participation (Hanley, 1987) • Nurse Practitioners' Involvement in Public Policy (Oden et al, 2000) • Predictors of organized political participation using the Civic Volunteerism Model (Cramer, 2002) • Nurses political participation using Civic Voluntarism Model (Vandenhouten et al, 2011) • Political Astuteness, via the Political Astuteness Inventory (Primomo & Bjorling, 2013;VandeeWaa et al, 2019;Clark, 2008) • Nurses' levels of knowledge and involvement in health policy development in Thailand (Kunaviktikul et al, 2010) • Knowledge transfer and exchange processes between researchers and policy makers in Israel (Ellen et al, 2014) • Internal and external political efficacy among nurse practitioners (O'Rourke et al, 2017).…”

The Level of Political Astuteness in Nursing Leaders

“…VandeWaa and colleagues compared the responses from 2016 to 2018 to assess the political astuteness in nurses, not specifically nursing leaders. 9,10 VandeWaa et al utilized the Political Astuteness Inventory (PAI) to gather their data and reported that the majority of nurses are not aware of the issues that are on voting ballots. 11 Liou et al 12 studied the perception of important competencies in nursing leadership; political astuteness was consistently on the bottom regardless of the nurses' leadership level.…”

“…There is very little current literature regarding the level of political astuteness in nursing leaders. VandeWaa and colleagues compared the responses from 2016 to 2018 to assess the political astuteness in nurses, not specifically nursing leaders 9,10 . VandeWaa et al utilized the Political Astuteness Inventory (PAI) to gather their data and reported that the majority of nurses are not aware of the issues that are on voting ballots 11 .…”