Chief Nursing Executive - Southeast Region

The Southeast region, Chief Nurse Executive (CNE) reports to the EVP, Chief Nurse Executive and is a member of the enterprise nursing and Southeast region leadership teams. This executive provides strategic leadership for all nursing, and other designated patient care functions and services within the Southeast region of the healthcare system. Leads, orchestrates and promotes quality patient care and professional nursing practice on behalf of the region. Responsible for assessing planning, coordinating, implementing, and evaluating nursing practice for the region. Accountability for ensuring high quality, safe and appropriate nursing care, competency of clinical staff, and appropriate resource management related to patient care. Facilitates the design and implementing the delivery of patient care, recommending strategies to improve services, reaching established goals, maintaining satisfactory outcomes and contributing to profitability. Oversees the effective recruiting, hiring, performance, engagement, development and retention of nursing staff. Assists in formulating the budget and maintains efficient and effective departmental operations while required compliance with all state, federal, and local regulations laws, standards, and protocols. Represents all nursing concerns to the region’s governing board and among regional medical staff leadership.
Given our Vision, the regional CNE must be a strategic and transformational leader for the organization. The leader in this role must drive change within a complex, rapidly-changing environment with cost and operating model pressures like never seen before. The executive plays an integral role in delivering on the organization's Strategic Priorities.
Major Responsibilities:
Regional Nursing Strategy: Collaborates with all regional and system nursing and administrative leaders to develop and implement a vision that includes a focus on coordinating quality patient care and nursing practices that relates to and supports the overall system strategy, advances research, and optimize system resources. Aligns multiple system facilities and diverse constituencies under a common vision and mission for clinical initiatives and nursing practice. Implements nursing strategic and operational initiatives that achieve measurable targets and ensure the organization maintains national prominence.
Nurse Ambassador for the SE Region: Serves as the key liaison between nurses, physicians and other organizational leadership. Establishes and maintain relationships across the enterprise to strengthen the overall effectiveness of the organization. Collaborates with senior executives and facility leaders to develop an institutional context for overall clinical initiatives. Ensures accurate and consistent communication of clinical and patient-centered nursing practice initiatives and strategies across the region. Assures that the clinical perspective is included in organizational decisions.
Patient Care Standards & Practices : Understands and articulates patient care standards reflected in federal and state regulation, and organizational policies and procedures. Maintains knowledge of current nursing practices and roles and functions within nursing and other healthcare disciplines. Maintains current knowledge of patient care delivery systems and innovations. Ensures that nursing practice is consistent with current standards and current evidenced based practice. Ensures that the care delivery model, clinical environment of care and related technology is appropriate to needs of caregivers and patients. Builds team consensus among nursing staff to ensure consistent application and interpretation of medical policy.
Patient Experience : Collaborates with patient experience to drive strategy and action across the continuum resulting in care that is superior in quality, safety and experience and evidenced by meeting exceeding Advocate Health regional benchmarks. Achieves breakthrough quality in harm reduction/”Safer Together”, a critical care, diabetes care.
Operations & Financial Management: Oversees regional nursing operations. Ongoing assessment or operational excellence and financial performance of the region. Manages all phases of the budget process including collecting, monitoring and interpreting data to assess and improve operational performance that meet or exceed benchmarks.
Staff Development & Management: Collaborates with enterprise leaders to allocate nursing resources based on measurement of patient acuity/care needed. Responsible for and assists with the development of budgets and staffing plans. Prepare and oversee business reports, including annual budgets. Oversees the effectiveness of nursing staff in managing care. Oversees the effective recruiting, hiring, performance, engagement, development and retention of nursing staff. Ensures staff is clinically competent and trained on their role in patient safety, performance improvement, and risk management. Provides information, educational opportunities, and experiential growth opportunities in order to develop nursing staff. Ensures availability of effective in-service staff training and education of nursing staff.
Quality & Continuous Improvement: Serves as change agent when patient care/workflow is redesigned. Advocate use of documented best practices. Evaluates and revises patient care processes and systems. Defines quality metrics by identifying the problem/process, measuring success at improving specific areas of patient care, analyzing the root causes or variation from quality standards, improving the process with the evidence, controlling solutions and sustaining success. Identifies and leads implementation of best practices, quality initiatives and standardization opportunities for clinical and nursing practices.
Patient Safety: Contributes to the development and implementation of the organization's performance improvement patient safety programs. Identifies, mitigates and takes action to correct areas of risk/liability in patient care. Supports a non-punitive environment and a reward system for reporting unsafe practices. Actively participates in facility clinical close calls.
Informatics: Collaborates with the enterprise CNIO in the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of information and communication systems that enhance individual and population health outcomes improve patient care, and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship. Ensures facility database management, decision support, and expert system programs are available to access information and analyze data from disparate sources for use in planning for patient care processes and systems. Participates in information system change processes and utility analysis. Ensures nursing involvement in the planning, design, choice and implementation of information systems in the practice environment. Demonstrates proficient awareness of legal and ethical issues related to client data, information, and confidentiality. Reads and interprets benchmarking, financial and occupancy data. Oversees computerized management systems to record administrative data {billing data, quality assurance data, workload data, etc.). Oversees applications for structured data entry (classification systems, acuity level, etc.).
Work Environment : Supports a safe culture that assures accountability and respects values and individual contributions. Enables an environment that encourages service excellence and cooperative collaboration both internally and externally. Creates a culture that recognized the value of people and teamwork. Creates a culture of excellence, accountability and results.
Regulatory Relations : Builds relationships with outside experts, professional associates and colleagues to ensure leading edge clinical and service practices for the region. Maintains exposure to and knowledge of regulatory, legislative, and governing bodies impacting healthcare. Stays current on current and proposed legislation and regulations that affect patient care.
Industry Trends & Research : Maintains mastery of societal and technological trends, issues and new developments as they apply to nursing. Utilizes and participates in generating research findings for the establishment of standards, practices, and patient care models in the organization. Participates in studies that provide outcome measurements. Disseminate research findings to patient care team members. Teaches and mentors others to routinely utilize evidenced-based data and research.
Education, Licensure Required:
Nursing degree required. If graduate degree is not in nursing, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing is required.
Active and current registered nurse license in the state of NC, SC, and/or GA required. Master's degree in nursing, healthcare administration or MBA required. Doctorate preferred.
Evidence of ongoing continuing education, pertinent professional certifications for an executive administration role at this level and scope required
Current, active involvement within local, regional and national healthcare administration area and professional associations preferred
Current CENP or NEA certification preferred
Experience Required:
Demonstrates passion and advocacy for patients, families, and the healthcare team; driven to nurture and serve
Demonstrates consistency, fairness and open communication; fosters trust throughout the organization
Advocates for staff and management to grow with the organization
Sensitive to, understands and encourages cultural diversity throughout the system and the community
Self-directed leader with focus on taking initiative, responsiveness, accountability, follow-through, results
Has enthusiasm and energy that stimulates, engages and inspires others
Management style characterized by enabling, leading and inspiring (versus directive or authoritative management- style).
Demonstrates executive presence, is articulate and communicates in a highly engaging manner
Approachable, engaging collaborator with excellent interpersonal and relationship building skills
Consensus builder who is mindful of the dynamics within a complex healthcare organization; politically astute, not political
Change leader that is able to successfully transform culture, programs and processes
Navigates and leads others through complex, difficult change
Strategic thinker with long-term vision and ability to translate vision into clear operating plans
Encourages others to innovate and to generate breakthrough ideas
Able to manage multiple priorities and deadlines in an expedient and decisive manner; makes timely decisions in stressful situations involving conflicting or delayed information
Exceptional ability to assess the skills, competencies, capabilities and impact of individuals and teams
Working knowledge of current information technologies and systems enabling clinical education, nursing practices and overall informatics
Working knowledge, leadership experience and implementation of quality improvement methodologies (e.g., IHI, Malcolm Baldrige, LEAN/Six Sigma). Understanding of the Magnet designation
Enterprise Leadership Imperatives:
Builds Talent for and Across the System
Demonstrated personal accountability for developing future generations of Advocate Health leaders who reflect the diversity of communities we serve. Engages actively with colleagues in assessing and developing executive talent, focusing on competencies and character. Invests time in coaching and mentoring high potentials for success. Is a role model, embodying the best of Advocate Health’s culture.
Understands and Shapes the External Environment
Is deeply knowledgeable about the Advocate Health business model and the consumer, competitive, political and social environments in which the organization operates. Understands the importance of actively engaging with and shaping these environments. Identifies, assesses and builds relationships with key stakeholders. Mobilizes and directs supporting capabilities in public affairs, communications and government relations to achieve desired outcomes.
Builds and Leads Inclusive, High-performing Leadership Teams
Understands the value of diversity in teams and gets the best out of all people. Establishes trust and creates a culture of psychological safety to enable candid debate. Builds consensus; decides when necessary. Delivers outstanding results through others.
Connects and Collaborates Across Advocate Health
Recognizes the critical importance of integration and collaboration in achieving high performance. Convenes and nurtures cross-system teams and works effectively in the “white spaces.” Seeks win-win outcomes and puts the well-being of the patient and the overall organization first. Leads effectively across cultures.
Envisions and Enacts the Future
Creates and communicates compelling visions of exciting, achievable futures. Mobilizes people and transforms organizations to realize the vision. Catalyzes innovation and builds supporting capabilities. Is a committed steward of the Advocate Health culture.
Enterprise Leadership Imperatives:
Thinks Critically and Strategically
Engages in rigorous problem-solving definition, data collection, and analysis, then makes good decisions in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. Recognizes important patterns in complex environments, distills the essence, and communicates through “powerful simplification.” Sees the big picture and has a long-term perspective, while balancing it against short-term realities.
This role is part of Advocate Health, the 5th largest Nonprofit health system in the country which includes 150K teammates, close to 42K nurses serving 6M patients in 67 hospitals and 1K sites of care in both the Midwest and Southeast.
Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health have come together to do more, be better and go faster to help more people live well. Together, we can deliver the best health outcomes and make care more accessible and affordable for all.