Abstract

Nursing workforce data development, standardization and liberation enable enhanced evidence-informed planning, staffing decision making and quality improvement initiatives. This commentary discusses how the nursing profession can work collaboratively to create an agile, responsive nursing workforce to meet patient needs and respond to broader health system goals through the optimal use of data, and describes data initiatives in progress that can assist nursing leaders to understand how to prepare the nursing workforce for a changing world. The data generated at registration by nursing regulators is a particularly strategic opportunity to leverage efforts to standardize and optimize data for such needed planning.