This book serves as both a challenge and a bridge to nursing and health care leaders as they grapple with the need for changing structures, approaches, and skills necessary to support sustainable health transformation. It offers a values-based, theoretically grounded guide for transforming the culture of health care systems and provides detailed, practical strategies for living the value of caring in the workplace using the Dance of Caring Persons as the framework for transformation. The book is organized into three sections. The first section begins with a chapter emphasizing the inevitable need for transformation in health care systems compelled by health care reform through the Affordable Care Act. The second and the third chapters provide a substantive understanding of the Dance of Caring Persons model that grounds the design and implementation of specific strategies and focus on the relationship of cultural aspects of a health care system to the experience of those within the system and ultimately to the success of the organization. The second section addresses strategies to prepare people and processes in all functions for whole system transformation. Successive chapters in the third section address practical strategies for transforming the organizational mission, leadership structures and processes, communication and outcomes. In keeping with the inclusive and dialogic character of the Dance of Caring Persons model, responses from health professionals representing a broad range of participants in health care are included in each chapter.
