Professional role clarity and competency in health care staffing--the missing pieces.

Professional role clarity and role competency are the missing pieces to achieving staffing excellence. The relationships among professional practice models, professional role competency, professional role clarity, patient safety, data, and staffing effectiveness build a solid equation, which supports improved patient outcomes. An essential variable binding these elements is housed in the patient handover conversation. Ensuring this handover is an evidence-based, data-driven conversation which contains both the medical and nursing plans of care provides standardization in nursing practice and improves patient safety. This powerful equation resets the nursing standard of practice and identifies the missing pieces to staffing excellence, namely, the integration of professional role clarity and professional role competency.