By Lisa Haufschild

As a nurse leader, building a culture of learning is essential, but educating nursing teams comes with plenty of hurdles. A lack of educators, limited budgets, diverse staff skill levels and generational learning differences make staff education challenging.

To address these challenges, the American Organization for Nursing Leadership( AONL) brought together a panel of eight hospital and health system chief nursing officers to address the complexities of nurse education and share their successes and strategies. Joining them was Medline Senior Director of Market Solutions

Angela Newman, MBA-HM, BSN, RN, CCRN, VA-BC. Together, they uncovered five key takeaways for nurse education.

1. Try new ways to onboard and train With nursing shortages continuing to affect many facilities, leaders are rethinking traditional approaches to nurse onboarding.

Boost the number of educators“ The lack of preceptors and educators is the biggest opportunity and challenge we’ re experiencing right now,” says Shelly Delfin, DPN, RN, CNO at Memorial Regional

Healthcare South, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.“ Much of our education is focused on orientation and new nurse training,” Delfin comments. In 2024, her team launched a multi-year initiative to increase educators to one per unit while onboarding 600 new nurses to stabilize staffing. She says because of that, a lot of education is focused on orientation.

Similarly, Los Angeles General Medical Center aimed to close staffing gaps by investing in education.“ We’ re hoping to triple the size [ of our education department ], but it still won’ t be enough to

22 Healthy Skin Issue 16 / Fall 2025