Nurses transforming care.

Patients and their families expect to receive safe, reliable, and respectful hospital care that fits their needs. Most of the time it does; but all too often it does not. The hard reality is that deep and dangerous gaps exist between the care that patients should receive and the care they actually do receive. No one knows this better than nurses, whose vigilance at the bedside may be a patient's last line of defense against broken processes—as well as a hospital's best opportunity to improve the quality of care. (November 2009)