Nurse Leader Strategies to Transform Healthcare

Nurse leaders are well aware of the unsatisfactory performance of the US health system in recent decades. International data reported by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) demonstrate that we lag behind even some middle-income countries in vital statistics such as infant mortality or life expectancy, while our per capita health expenditures are nearly twice as much as the second costliest country.1 There is a high level of consensus that healthcare costs are out of control and unsustainable, and that the complexity of the system has become unmanageable.2 It has been observed that if banking functioned like healthcare, it could take days or longer for an ATM transaction because of unavailable or missing records. If home construction were like healthcare, each subcontractor would work from different blueprints with very little coordination. And if shopping were like healthcare, prices would not be posted, and the price charged for a single item would vary widely within the same store depending on the source of payment.2