The current nursing shortage in developed countries has escalated international nurse recruitment efforts and caused nurse migration away from developing countries. Dependence on foreign-trained nurses in developed countries has significant implications on global healthcare delivery. The Best Outcomes Nursing Children with Excellence (BOuNCE) project is aimed at developing a reproducible nursing retention and development model to help keep nurses in their homeland in order to meet the health care needs of local pediatric patients.

Across the world, successful health care depends upon on all nations having the ability to supply adequate nursing care to their sick. The goal of the BOuNCE project is to test the premise that by fostering nursing professional development at a specific institution, recruitment and retention of nurses will be enhanced. Our project’s interventions focus on the following: 1) implementing practice-based nurse training, 2) exploring clinical leadership roles, and 3) team building. Central to the structure of this program is a “twinning” relationship between Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. We plan to explore our interventions, the outcomes, and the implications of the project for global health care. The project highlights the potential to improve a global problem when institutions in different nations come together to enhance health care delivery for pediatric patients