What happened at Council: Your June 2022 recap
CNO’s board of directors, which is called Council, provides oversight, insight and foresight into CNO’s strategic direction. At its June meeting, Council welcomed a new president, seven new members, heard about CNO’s 2021 annual report, and the ways in which CNO is putting our Strategic Plan into action. To see all the agenda items, go to our Council Meetings page.
Here's a highlight of what happened at Council.
New faces at Council
Council President Naomi Thick kicked off her term as Council President. Thick has been a member of Council since 2017 and was previously the Vice-President, RN on Council from 2020 to 2022. (Read this article to meet Thick and learn about her career as a nurse and goals as Council President.)
We also welcome Patricia Sullivan-Taylor, RN to the role of Vice-President, RN, Raj Kaur, RPN, to the role of Vice-President, RPN, and public members Maria Sheculski and Fidelia Osime to the Executive Committee. Read our article from the March issue of The Standard to learn more about the new members of Council.
Our 2021 annual report
Carol Timmings, Acting Executive Director and CEO, introduced CNO’s 2021 annual report, called Strengthening the System, to Council. The annual report is part of our commitment to partnership and accountability. It details the work we did to protect and promote patient safety in 2021, including registering a record number of internationally educated nurses (IENs) and working with our valued partners in patient safety, such as Ontario Health, with whom we laid the groundwork for the Supervised Practice Experience Partnership (SPEP).
CNO is required under the Registered Health Professions Act, 1991, to submit an annual report to the Minister of Health — Council’s role is to approve the report for submission to the Minister, which they did at this meeting.
Our Strategic Plan in action
Acting Executive Director and CEO Carol Timmings led a presentation on the work being done to implement CNO’s Strategic Plan. Three outcomes are tied to our Strategic Plan.
1. Applicants for registration will experience processes that are evidence-informed, fair, inclusive and effective, contributing to improve public access to safe nursing care.
2. Nurses’ conduct will exemplify understanding and integration of CNO standards for safe practice.
3. CNO will be recognized as a trusted stakeholder to nurses, employers and the public.
The outcomes of our Strategic Plan will support the health care system now — and in the future.
CNO, like all health regulatory colleges, plays an important role influencing patient care in this province. But we don’t do this alone — we collaborate with policy experts, government decision-makers and members of the public, who significantly contribute to and sustain this system. We build partnerships to work toward our shared purpose of public safety. Here are a few examples of ways we are working together, with our valued partners in the health care system, to put our Strategic Plan into action.
Modernizing applicant assessment
We are modernizing the way we register nurses, continuing to change and innovate our registration practices for the benefit of Ontario’s health care system. For instance, we launched the Supervised Practice Experience Partnership (SPEP) with Ontario Health in January. This new program offers applicants a way to meet their final registration requirements. Since it started, 1,103 potential nurses have been matched with employers. Two hundred and seventy-two are now fully registered with CNO and contributing to the nursing workforce!
We also changed our Language Proficiency policy, resulting in an increase of IENs we registered, compared to last year.
Quality assurance
Our Quality Assurance (QA) program is another way we have been meeting the demands of the modern world. The QA program is CNO’s commitment to the public that every practicing nurse in Ontario engages in continuous learning throughout their careers. During the pandemic, we shifted the focus of QA to self-reflection and emphasized the importance of reflection as a daily activity. This approach empowers nurses to maintain their continued competence, by reflecting on their practice to identify their own opportunities for learning and growth.
As COVID-19 continues to affect nurses, our QA program has been agile: we have kept our selection of nurses for QA Assessment small, and the activities are completely electronic, so they are accessible. We have also developed new resources for nurses and new tools for assessing nurses’ QA activities, and we now offer coaching support for nurses participating in QA Assessment.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Our commitment to embracing diversity, equity and inclusion (or DEI) is deepening as we embed it into all areas of our work. Diversity, equity and inclusion is part of our culture and will enable us to achieve the outcomes in our Strategic Plan. We have focused on education and awareness for staff, and now have a multi-year plan for integrating these principles into the way we work at CNO, to support health equity for all people in Ontario. We are making progress, and we have progress to continue to make.
Using data to drive insight
Developing CNO’s insights capability is one of the four pillars of the Strategic Plan. We’ve completed several foundational activities, including establishing a data governance framework, which includes policies, accountabilities and processes, such as data quality improvement. We have commenced development of operational reports from this tool and will move to business intelligence and advanced analytics next year.
Evolving our complaints process
In 2021, we evolved our process for addressing concerns about a nurse or nursing care. We created a complaints and reports intake approach that, when appropriate, resolves low-risk matters early so we can focus on higher-risk concerns.
The work to put our Strategic Plan into action continues, and there is more to come at the September Council meeting.
Year-end audited financial statements
Council voted to approve the year-end audited financial statements for the period ending Dec. 31, 2021. You can read these statements in our 2021 annual report.
If you’d like to watch Council decisions as they happen, tune in on YouTube when we live stream our next meeting in September. You can also read more about the decisions Council made, in the minutes of the meeting, which we will post on our Council page in the coming weeks.
