Establishing the "North Star" for Clinical Education to Accelerate Practice Readiness: Implications for Leaders,...

Ambiguity and confusion persist around the goal and purpose of clinical experiences in nursing education. As a result of this ambiguity and confusion, the potential exists to waste valuable clinical time, to create ineffective learning objectives, to focus on the tasks of nursing rather than the competencies required for nursing practice, and to perpetuate a mismatch of in-person clinical experiences with simulation decreasing the ability to achieve clinical practice readiness. Nurse leaders across academia, regulation and accreditation agencies, and practice settings must establish consensus about the purpose and goals of clinical education in order to align learning outcomes and expectations of clinical practice readiness. This article synthesizes Dr Patricia Benner's vast body of writings to create a universal "North Star" to align and guide all nurse educators and clinical education on appropriate learning outcomes, andragogies, and expectations for nursing students and new graduates to support clinical practice readiness and the formation of nurses' skilled know-how, notions of good practice, clinical reasoning and more that are required for excellent nursing practice. Leaders in academia, regulation, accreditation, and practice should adopt the goals delineated in this "North Star" as being the end-points of practice formation, create learning experiences to support practice formation from novice to expert, and create meaningful evaluation strategies that go beyond traditional psychometric testing. When academia, regulation, accreditation, and practice all adopt these goals of clinical education, we contend that there will be congruence and more seamless transitions across the academic-regulation-accreditation-practice spectrum.