The Academy of Canadian Executive Nurses (ACEN), the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), and Canada Health Infoway (CHI) partnered together with financial support from Health Canada to host a collaborative forum of nursing leaders. The Think Tank: Toward a National Report Card for Nursing held in Montreal, Quebec on February 13, 2011 brought together approximately 50 nurse leaders in health services delivery from each region of the country, as well as thought leaders from other key sectors: research, education, professional associations, informatics, regulatory bodies and federal/provincial/territorial nurse advisers. The objectives of the Think Tank were for nurse leaders to create a shared vision and critical path for a national report card on nursing, to generate support for the work amongst the nursing leadership community, and to outline the concrete steps to achieve it through collaboration with other national and quality system initiatives for health information in Canada.

The report card is envisioned to be a selected minimum set of data on structure, process and outcome indicators that could be collected nationally (initially using pilot sites) and benchmarked.  In the future, such a report card will be used to formulate relationships between the levels of indicators, and to use this information to influence policy directions for nursing and its contribution to both nursing sensitive-clinical outcomes and quality indicators. 

Follow up meetings of key stakeholders will be held to delineate the key learning's from the Think Tank and to develop the critical path for the development of the national report card for nursing.