title: The TriCouncil for Nursing: An Interorganizational Collaboration for Advancing the Profession.
abstract: The TriCouncil for Nursing is a coalition of 4 leading nursing organizations: the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the American Nurses Association, the American Organization of Nurse Executives, and the National League for Nursing. This informal, yet highly complex, collaboration has endeavored to advance the profession for almost 4 decades despite the inherent challenges in coalition formation and sustainment. Coalition building occurs when organizations seek the potential to advance common issues or protect individual resources or status, and by their very nature have the potential to fail. The history of the TriCouncil for Nursing provides evidence of the challenges associated with the process of developing consensus and the benefits of working to create consensus to achieve common goals. The commitment of the TriCouncil member organizations to sustain this coalition and find consensus across an array of challenging issues and in complex environments has created significant policy advances for the profession, which provides evidence of the benefits associated with this type of collaborative work. This coalition has continued despite the inherent challenges for organizations seeking consensus. The TriCouncil commitment to lead in advocacy for the profession and create significant policy to change health care models the value of this type of effort.
authors.affiliation: University of Vermont, Burlington and Australian Catholic University, Australia. Dr Bednash was CEO of American Association of Colleges of Nursing, Washington, DC.
authors.forename: Geraldine Polly
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Bednash
mesh_terms: D006286:Health Planning Councils; D006801:Humans; D009729:Nursing; D012956:Societies, Nursing; D014481:United States