Nursing leadership... from the board room to the bedside

Nurses running hospitals is not new. Florence Nightingale could be considered the first hospital administrator. What is changing is the growth of RN chief executive officers (CEOs), from 10% in 2004 to 18% in 2010. Furthermore, nearly 20% of chief nursing officers (CNOs) aspire to be CEOs. Is this a natural growth of CNO to vice president of patient care services to chief operating officer...to RN CEO? The research on RN CEOs is very small. Therefore, the author set out to obtain a journalistic snapshot of Arizona's 12 hospital RN CEOs through interviews. Of the 12, 3 were corporate CEOs at the system level, they saw over several hospitals, and 9 were CEOs over 1 to 2 hospitals. This article discusses some of the finding from these interviews.