How Marian Shaughnessy Helped Launch a National Push for Nurses on Boards

Michael Shaughnessy, Marian Shaughnessy and Joyce Fitzpatrick.

Joyce J. Fitzpatrick, Director of the Marian K. Shaughnessy Nurse Leadership Academy, shares the story of how Marian Shaughnessy’s pioneering inquiry into nurse representation on boards became a catalyst for the creation of the Nurses on Boards Coalition (NOBC).

Marian Shaughnessy was committed to increasing nurses’ influence in healthcare policy from her early days as a nurse. She began coursework for the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree program at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing in 2012, just after she accepted a Board position at University Hospitals of Cleveland. At that time she was the only nurse on the hospital governing board and she was co-chair of the Quality Committee of the Board. In fact, one of the reasons she decided to obtain a doctoral degree was to influence and elevate her status at the board level. She had considered a doctoral in management but I convinced her to take on leadership class in the DNP program to see if she wanted to continue. She did both, enrolling in her first class in 2012 and completing her degree in 2017.

At that same time I was chairing the Board of the American Nurses Foundation (ANF), the philanthropic arm of the American Nurses Enterprise. As a Board, under the leadership of Executive Director Kate Judge, we were discussing the need for a push to get nurses on boards, including, but not exclusively hospital boards.

Joyce Fitzpatrick, Marian Shaughnessy and Mary Quinn Griffin

I was also responsible for teaching the executive leadership classes within our DNP program. I had a number of leadership DNP students, including Marian, who needed practicum hours in leadership to complete their DNP requirements.

Marian Shaughnessy was one of the first to explore the then-current status of nurses on hospital boards. She wrote of her own experience on a hospital board and interviewed other nurses who were on hospital boards, including Angela Barron McBride and Linda Burnes Bolton, luminaries and pioneers in the field of hospital board leadership. Linda Burnes Bolton was also a member of the CWRU Board of Trustees, the only nurse. There were a number of other nurses on hospital boards that Marian interviewed and she shared her reports with the ANF leadership.

A number of other students were engaged in assisting us with understanding nurses on hospital boards. They gathered the list of Magnet designated hospitals and ascertained how many of these hospitals had nurses on their governing boards at the time. According to their analysis, less than 5% of the Magnet designated hospitals had nurses on their governing boards (aside from the chief nurses who were ex-officio members.

Kate Judge and I invited Marian Shaughnessy to join the ANF Board. She helped lead one of the first group of individual funders to support the national effort to increase the number of nurses on boards of directors. In so doing she enabled the ANF to launch the Nurses on Boards Coalition (NOBC) which was formally established in 2014. Her ongoing funding, along with the support of the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, also enabled the ANF to provide educational programs to support nurses on their leadership journeys. And of course, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

In 2018, following Marian’s graduation from the DNP program in May 2017, Marian and her husband, Michael Shaughnessy endowed the Marian K. Shaughnessy Nurse Leadership Academy at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at CWRU with the goal of developing and support a new generation of leaders in the field of nursing. Marian Shaughnessy told an audience at the School of Nursing luncheon during the announcement of the Academy of her vision: “My vision is to transform health care for all populations and to improve the nation’s health.”

One of the foundational dimensions of the Marian K. Shaughnessy Nurse Leadership Academy is that of partnerships. Given our shared history and our alignment of missions, it was especially fitting that the Marian K. Shaughnessy Nurse Leadership Academy joined NOBC as an organizational affiliate.