Leading towards the future: implementing nursing leadership principles at the front line

Federal and provincial professional bodies of nursing and healthcare are examining the role of nursing leadership and its relation in creating and sustaining quality work environments for nursing. Using the findings and recommendations of the Canadian Nursing Advisory Report Committee (2002) as a catalyst, nurse leaders from Children's and Women's Health Centre of British Columbia (C&W) have collaborated to develop principles of nursing leadership to be used as a resource in determining roles and functions of front-line nurse leaders throughout the organization. In this paper, the process of creating those nursing leadership principles is described with a focus on the unit-based operational leader. Suggestions are made on how to evaluate the effectiveness of principle-based nursing leadership as implemented at C&W and its utility to the unit-based operational leader.