UCLL Research & Expertise
Zoek
Banner CLNE

ERA+ Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education

Project overview

illustratie

Clinical leadership is essential for nurses to ensure safe and high-quality care, delivered efficiently within the current complex healthcare system with diminishing resources. However, clinical leadership is not well defined in nursing education curricula in Europe. Additionally, it is not well integrated into these curricula. Furthermore, clinical leadership remains a vague concept for many nurses in the field and nursing students. Leadership is often associated with hierarchical leadership rather than bedside leadership, which is essential for direct patient care and improving outcomes at the clinical level.

This project aims to enhance understanding and implementation of clinical leadership in nursing education (CLNE) across Europe. The key expected outcomes include: a conceptual framework for bedside clinical leadership, a gap analysis tool to identify discrepancies between nursing education curricula and the competencies required for clinical leadership, an open access clinical leadership library with educational and training materials. The project seeks to better prepare nursing students for their future roles and strengthen clinical leadership across all partner countries and more broadly in Europe.

This Erasmus+ KA220-HED project, “Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education,” has been funded with support from the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. It is a two-year KA2 Partnership in higher education project on clinical leadership in nursing education, involving partners from Finland, Portugal, and Belgium.

What is clinical leadership?

Clinical leadership involves a healthcare provider using their personal influence to impact individuals or groups, with the goal of improving patient outcomes and strengthening the broader healthcare environment. They recognize their influence and their professional and ethical responsibilities. They are clinical experts who provide direct patient care. In their actions, they demonstrate emotional intelligence, challenge ineffective work processes, and inspire others to take action. From this position, they participate in decision-making within an interprofessional practice setting based on clinical autonomy. 

Definition used by ERA+ consortium based on Grindel, C. G. (2016). Clinical Leadership: A Call to Action. Medsurg Nurs, 25(1), 9-16

Clinical Leadership Competence Framework in Nursing Education

What does it take for a nurse to lead at the bedside? An integrative literature review identified the competences that make up clinical leadership in nursing. The resulting framework was then assessed by experts and discussed in workshops with nurses, educators and students in Belgium, Finland and Portugal.

The framework describes clinical leadership as six interrelated domains: ethics, professional nursing, innovation and change, influencing and advocacy, team leadership, and communication and collaboration. Together they cover fourteen competences.

clinical leadership in nursing education framework

1. The literature review

Clinical leadership competence in nursing: An integrative literature review
The scientific basis of the framework: how it was developed, the evidence behind each domain and competence, and what it means for nursing education.

Literature review.pdf

ERA+ Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education
Download

2. The competence framework

ERA+ Clinical leadership in nursing education competence framework
All six domains and fourteen competences with a short description of each, in one table. Ready to use for curriculum review or teaching.

ERA+ Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education Framework.pdf

ERA+ Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education
Download

3. Article in Laurea Journal

Clinical leadership in nursing education: development of competency framework
An short article on the project and how the framework was developed with experts, nurses, educators and students.

Gap analysis: how is clinical leadership integrated into your nursing programme?

illustratie

How well is clinical leadership integrated into your nursing programme?

These guidelines help you reflect on current practices and compare them with the ERA+ Clinical leadership competency framework (see above). By exploring strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, you gain insight into where your curriculum is already strong and where further development is needed. These insights can support you in refining or reshaping your curriculum.

Guidelines for curriculum evaluation

Guidelines for curriculum evaluation: gap identification between the clinical leadership framework and nursing curricula
Step-by-step guidance to analyse how clinical leadership is integrated in your nursing programme, using the competency framework as a reference.
 

Guidelines for Curriculum Evaluation_English.pdf

ERA+ Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education
Download

Also available in: Dutch, Finnish and Portuguese.

Clinical Leadership in Nursing Education: an open access library

illustratie

This Clinical Leadership Library supports educators, students and practitioners in developing the skills needed for effective clinical leadership in nursing. It brings together carefully selected teaching resources that deepen understanding of clinical leadership and help put it into practice.

The library is organised by competence domain, following the ERA+ Clinical Leadership Competence Framework. For each domain, you will find inspirational good practices, teaching materials and simulation cases that you can use in simulation sessions, skills training and practical lessons. Most resources strengthen several competences at once; we list each one under the competence it supports most.

We created this library to inspire and support your teaching, and to help bring the competences of the framework into everyday nursing education. Supporting materials are available in multiple languages upon request.

How to use the library

  1. Evaluate your curriculum
    Start with the gap analysis above: it shows which clinical leadership competences your programme already covers and where it can grow
  1. Explore the overview
    See all competence domains, competences and teaching materials in on tabel.

    VIEW FULL OVERVIEW
  1.  Choose a comptence domain
    Click on a domain below to find good practices, teaching materials and simulation cases for the competences you want to strengthen.

Choose a competence domain

professional nursing
Innovation & change
Advocacy & influencing
Team leadership
Communication & Collaboration
Ethics

 

Background to the library

Two reports from the project offer further background on teaching clinical leadership.

Literature summary: teaching methods & curriculum

Fostering clinical leadership in nursing education: insights for curriculum integration and teaching methods.
Download

Workshop report: learning goals for nursing internships

Shaping clinical leadership in nursing internships: learning goals and insights from a workshop with nursing internship supervisors.
Download

Looking for more?

Read the blog posts from the ERA+ project and explore existing clinical leadership tools developed by other experts.

 

Contact information

For questions about the project, please contact Anabel Wanzele ( anabel.wanzele@ucll.be ), Centre of Expertise Health Innovation.

Dissemination

Follow us on LinkedIn for more information and updates

QR code voor de survey

We value your feedback
How satisfied are you with this website? We would appreciate your feedback! You can evaluate the website by scanning the QR code or by clicking on the button.
 

Free to use and adapt for non-commercial purposes, with reference to ERA+ CLNE. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, except for scientific articles, which follow the conditions of the journal.

Co-funded by the European Union. The European Union support for the production of this publication does not constitute endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.