PAMELA YOUNG MAHON, PHD, RN, NEA-BC, CNE, describes the faculty role at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursihg, part of the city University of New York (CUNY), as challenging and expansive. All faculty teach across undergraduate and graduate programs and are familiar with the total student experience in the classroom, lab, and clinical settings. Pamela, an associate professor, maintains that this level of involvement fully informs the teaching at HBSON, named in 2010 an NLN Center of Excellence for creating environments that enhance student learning and professional development.
Pamela credits the school's Manhattan location, in the heart of New York City, as a key factor in providing faculty opportunities to truly fulfill "our multiple professional nursing roles--educator, clinician, and researcher." Noting that HBSON is not formally part of a medical center, she points out that its location allows for developing affiliations with some of the finest health care delivery systems in the world. "We are located within a 10block stretch of hospitals that include Bellevue, the VA, New York University Medical Center, and the Rusk Rehabilitation Center. We are walking distance from Beth Israel Medical Center, a bus ride away from the Weill Cornell Medical Center, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Lenox Hill Hospital, and a subway ride away from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center."
Housed in a mid-20th-century building that features beautiful marble reliefs depicting nursing education and service, the school has fully functioning simulation labs, computer labs, and wireless internet throughout the classrooms and grounds. "Despite the obvious wear and tear of the building," Pamela says, "we are able to innovate teaching and learning with high levels of educational technology through a number of grant initiatives and strong faculty-staff collaboration. It is testament to the phenomenon that the spirit of innovation--and the process of communicating well and working creatively together--can overcome the deficiencies of aging structures. Our nursing students are very aware and appreciative that as a public college, we are able to provide much the same level of learning resources at approximately one-tenth the tuition rate of nearby private schools of nursing!"
Pamela's career at HBSON has followed many roles over the years, from staff nurse and manager to coordinator, assistant chief, director, and professor at a CUNY community college. She describes the transition from ADN to BSN and MSN education as transformative, helping her enjoy one of her current faculty roles, project director of BESt 2.0, more than she had originally anticipated. BESt 2.0 is a HRSA-funded Nursing Workforce Diversity initiative, the acronym for Becoming Excellent Students in Nursing. "We were awarded approximately $1.4 million over three years to promote the development and progression of educationally and economically disadvantaged students into and through the HBSON, and on to licensure as professional RNs."
In her faculty role at the community college, Pamela appreciated students' focus on mastering technical skills and their zeal to hit the ground running in the workplace. She points out at that many of her students were single parents or otherwise financially responsible for their families, and immediate full-time employment, with benefits, was a necessary goal.
Noting that community college students "met that challenge with grit and determination," she contrasts them with graduates of the senior college, who usually take a longer view and frequently question which place of employment will position them best for future advancement. "As graduation approaches, conversations shift toward graduate education and growing fields of clinical practice. In the community college setting, conversations were geared toward the hopeful, and sometimes remote, possibility that ADN graduates could somehow find the time to complete the BSN, perhaps after their own children completed high school."
Another interesting contrast between teaching at a senior versus community college in the CUNY system is the number of contractual teaching hours. "At the community college it was 27, while at the senior college it is 21. That means that every community college nursing faculty member has to teach a clinical section every semester. My current 21-hour load makes the expected engagement in research much more feasible. I am now more fully able to utilize my PhD."
Along with her BESt responsibilities, Pamela is coordinator of the Accelerated Second-Degree Pathway (A2DP). It was thought originally, Pamela notes, that the needs of the A2DP and BESt students would be divergent, but she describes the early experiences as surprising. "Both groups see themselves as somewhat different and distinct from the larger traditional body of generic students, and both seek tutoring and financial aid services at higher rates than the other generic students."
Pamela could not be more adamant about the need for both programs. "One of the great challenges to health care disparities is the fact that key community segments remain underrepresented in our profession!" She points to the latest US Census Bureau data and results from the NLN Annual Survey of Schools of Nursing to paint a picture of contrasts: "While African Americans are proportionately represented in the general population and throughout prelicensure nursing programs, Hispanics are doubling in numbers in all census projections, yet remain dramatically missing at all levels of the nursing profession." (See the NLN Annual Survey Executive Summary in "Headlines from the NLN," page 207.)
To address this disparity, BESt 2.0 targets Hispanic, as well as African American students, at various points along the educational ladder: high school, college prenursing majors, nursing prelicensure students, and RN-BSN completion students. "We provide an array of support services--college prep academies, tutoring, counseling, leadership development activities, cultural competency workshops, stipends, and scholarships. I'm looking forward to evaluating these two new programs more closely as outcome data become available."
Pamela points to the confluence of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the publication of the Carnegie Foundation book Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation, and the release of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Future of Nursing report and calls this "an incredibly exciting time to be part of nursing education." We have a level of opportunity to grow as a profession, she says, not seen since the landmark 1923 Goldmark Report, which identified the critical need to upgrade nurse training in hospital service to formal nursing education in university settings.
Providing context, Pamela notes that the 1948 Carnegie Foundation Brown Report reiterated many of the higher educational recommendations of the Goldmark Report and can be viewed as a foundation for both Educating Nurses and the 2010 IOM report. "The fundamental nursing and health delivery concerns from the beginning of the last century are the same nearly 90 years later. Increasing diversity in the largest segment of the health delivery workforce, namely nursing, will address health disparities and promote equality of access. Key measures to bring about diversity and equal access include upgrading nursing education and delivering care at the fullest scope of nursing practice. Upgraded nursing education and fully enfranchising nursing practice can help implement the Affordable Care Act in ways that enhance quality and conserve costs."
In the meantime, Pamela speaks of her students as the reason she loves teaching. "They are energetic, engaged, enterprising, enthusiastic, exceptional. They are our future, and I am delighted to report that the future of nursing at HBSON is looking its BEST!"
Antoinette M. Hays, PhD, RN, dean of Regis College School of Nursing, Science, and Health Professions, Weston, Massachusetts, will become president of the college effective July I. The Regis College School of Nursing is an NLN Center of Excellence.
Liana Orsolini-Hain, PhD, RN, CCRN, a tenured nursing instructor at the City College of San Francisco who served on the Committee on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Initiative on the Future of Nursing at the Institute of Medicine, has been named one of four Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellows for 2011-2012. A per diem staff nurse at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, her research and scholarly work examine factors that influence educational progression of associate-degree-prepared nurses.
Lisa Ann Plowfield, PhD, RN, has been named as the new chancellor at Penn State York, effective August I. She has been dean and professor at the College of Nursing at Florida State University since 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment