The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is pleased to announce it is accepting applications for a new award program, co-sponsored by nursing organizations, that will recognize nurses who are helping lead the way to health equity through practice, education, research or leadership. We hope you will consider applying, nominating someone, or sharing word of the program with others who may be interested.

Five winners in separate categories will receive $1,000 each, plus paid travel to and attendance at the Campaign’s health equity summit in Washington, D.C., where awardees will be recognized at a reception. The AARP Health Equity and Nursing Summit: Turning Commitments into Action is scheduled for Oct. 31-Nov. 1 at AARP’s National Office. The conference will bring together leaders from health care delivery, nursing, unions, business, social services, social justice and consumer organizations to identify evidence-based solutions to the problems of disparities in health care delivery and access.

The Campaign launched an equity-minded nurse initiative in 2022 as part of its work to implement recommendations from the National Academy of Medicine report, the Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity. The Campaign defines equity-mindedness for nurses as so deeply understanding and embracing health equity, social justice, anti-racism, and cultural humility that these concepts emerge as normalized, automatic and default thought processes no matter the setting or the group of people they work with. In addition, AARP has launched the AARP Center for Health Equity through Nursing^SM, known as A-CHEN.

Individuals can apply or nominate others for an award beginning July 17 through Aug. 18. The Campaign will convene reviewers for each award category to evaluate applications and select winners, who will be notified in September.  

The award categories are: 

• The Equity-Minded Rising Star for student or early career nurses whose contributions show promise for ongoing impact in reducing health disparities and advancing health equity. This award is co-sponsored by the National League for Nursing.

• The Equity-Minded Practice Award for a nurse whose work with patients, families and/or communities exemplifies efforts to reduce health disparities and advance health equity.

• The Equity-Minded Research Award for a nurse researcher whose scholarship advances science knowledge that advances health equity.

• The Equity-Minded Educator Award for a nurse educator whose efforts demonstrate excellence in diversifying the nursing student body, inclusive teaching/learning practices, and whose teaching and/or curriculum design includes topics that lead to the graduation of equity-minded nurses. This award is co-sponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (Updated: July 27, 2023).

• The Equity-Minded Leader Award for a nurse who is a catalyst for change at the systems or organization level to address and dismantle policies and structures that contribute to disparities and inequities. This award is co-sponsored by the American Organization for Nursing Leadership.

For more information about the award program, please see the frequently asked questions on the Campaign’s website.  

We thank you for your interest and hope you will consider applying or nominating someone.

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When the National Academy of Medicine released its 2021 report, The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity, the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and RWJF, took up the challenge to help implement the report’s goals. Among those goals is to deploy nurses and nursing to advance health equity. One of the Campaign’s strategies for achieving this goal is to elevate and amplify the concept of the equity-minded nurse. Our Health Equity Senior Fellow, Kupiri “Piri” Ackerman-Barger, PhD, RN, FAAN, wrote an essay to introduce the concept.

She notes that historically, in their roles as front-line health care providers, nurses have observed the consequences of longstanding health disparities but have not seen themselves as agents with the power to change things. But, she writes:

To help more nurses embrace and elevate the equity mindset – that is already inherent in the work of nursing – we asked some of the Campaign’s stakeholders to share their views on what equity-minded nursing means to them. The result is nine short videos that we will share throughout the summer and fall, with each nurse talking about how he or she brings an equity mindset to their unique nursing role. 

Also as part of this effort, we are publishing a series of blog posts by nurses, for nurses, offering a remarkable range of personal and professional stories about achieving health equity through nursing.

Below we list the individuals you can hear from by clicking over to their videos.

“When we’re taking care of patients, we are taking care of them holistically.”

Sadie Anderson, MSN, RN
President, National Alaska Native American Indian Nurses Association, Inc

“When we think about equity-minded nursing [it is] really to think about it from birth through the entirety of a person’s lifetime.”

Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, PhD, NNP-BC, FAAN
RWJF senior nurse scholar and professor at The George Washington University School of Nursing

Equity-minded nursing starts “with us each individually as a nurse recognizing where we stand and where we come from, and really doing an assessment of our own, our own experiences and what we are as nurses.”

Karen Drenkard, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
Strategic Advisory Committee member, Campaign for Action

“Never underestimate what a group of concerned citizens could do to change a world.” And I say to nurses, “don’t underestimate what you can do in really helping these marginalized groups.”

Paul Leon, RN, BSN, PHN
Senior Health Equity Fellow, Campaign for Action

“A lot of our nurses… that different lens that they’re coming with is filled by passion, desire to improve the health of their families and health of their communities, but ultimately, the health of the populations that they serve.”

Adrianna Nava, PhD, MPA, RN
President, National Association of Hispanic Nurses

“I think you have to be introspective and know your own values and beliefs, and your own stereotypes and prejudices and deal with those.”

Barbara Nichols, MS, RN, FAAN
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Senior Advisor, Campaign for Action

“Health equity is inclusive and inclusiveness is everyone being at the table.”

Blake Smith, MSN, RN
Immediate past president, American Association of Men in Nursing

“I can take the time to understand, to read, to watch, to understand the lived experience of others.”

Beth Toner, RN, MSN, MJ
Director, program communications, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Being “open-minded is so important, do not make assumptions.”

Jing Wang, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN
President, Asian American/Pacific Islander Nurses Association, Inc

The post Nine Nurses Talk About Equity-Minded Nursing appeared first on Campaign for Action.

As the featured article, the authors describe the project in a podcast which can be found on the  NASN podcast page and on the journal’s homepage in the “Browse by” section under the Podcasts tab. It will also be added to the article as supplemental material by the SAGE production team. 

The BSD Lifesavers program will continue this year with support from the Delaware Nurses Action Coalition and with funding from our community partners, Christiana Care, the University of Delaware School of Nursing and the Brandywine School District. 

The post Delaware Innovation Grant Featured in NASN School Nurse  appeared first on Campaign for Action.

As the calendar flips to August, America’s schools are preparing for a new academic year, the fourth one impacted by COVID-19.

School nurses are the front lines of public health and primary care, and the Campaign is pleased to share two blogs from a global school nurse researcher and board-certified advanced public health nurse who advocates for children living in vulnerable populations. The focus is the role of school nurses in addressing health inequities and mental health.

The National Academy of Medicine’s Future of Nursing 2020-2030 report called nurses to action to address health inequities. Another focus of the report was school nursing. School nurses are on the frontlines of public health and primary care. So what is the role of school nurses in addressing health inequities?

The Center for School Health Innovation & Quality is exploring that question. The Center is a new initiative to advance the science and profession of school health, especially school nursing, in order to better serve all students, including those from underserved groups.

The Center reached out to school nurse thought leaders who, along with their own experience, identified key ways school nurses address health inequities. In addition to learning and being aware of their own implicit biases, the Center identified the following activities:

• School nurses use data to map poverty and other social factors with chronic conditions to determine further inequities and create solutions, such as coordinating for mobile clinics for dental, vision, and well-child exams to be provided at the school. An example, published by Center members, includes a school nurse supervisor who mapped her data and learned low-income students, due to their medical treatments were assigned to schools sometime an hour away from their homes. The commute time, often on public transportation, raised concern. She advocated for more equitable school placements.  School nurse should examine their data to determine if individualized care plans, 504 accommodations, and other health activities equitably represent the needs of their student population.
  • School nurses already conduct physical health screenings such as vision and hearing. Many nurses are expanding to include screening on social needs. This helps identify inequities earlier for individual families as well as look at trends of the population in order to identify more upstream solutions.
  • School nurses review and advocate for changes in school policies so as not to perpetuate health inequities. These include:
    • School lunches and lunch shaming (schools can move to universal free lunch programs)
    • Vaccine policies of “no shots no school” when there are issues of access. (School nurses often coordinate with local providers and the health department to provide school-located vaccine clinics to assure all have access to vaccinations)
    • School-to-Prison Pipeline. Researchers have found that there are inequities in suspensions and discipline occurrences that play out in school, creating a school-to-prison pipeline. A school nurse can look at their own activities to identify disparities in activities by groups in vulnerable situations, and advocate for a regular review of all infractions to identify possible inequities.
    • Period poverty. School nurses can provide and advocate for free menstruation supplies as well as make others aware of the growing problem.
    • Fees for sports or other extracurricular activities. Although improving, some schools still charge fees for students to participate in sports and various after school activities. This limits who can participate. Sports and other extracurricular activities help increase students’ chances for college.
    • Sports physicals. Many schools require physicals, which can be expensive, and some providers charge even to fill out a form. School nurses can advocate for free physicals and other options.
• School nurses see inequities and social issues and have the data to advocate for larger systemic changes such as:
  • violence in the neighborhood before, during, and after school.
  • no bussing
  • clean buses
  • improved school ventilation systems (air conditioning, appropriate heating)
  • access to WIFI (so children do not need to sit in fast food parking lots to do homework or access telehealth)
  • access to clean water
  • grassless playgrounds
  • access to fresh foods, such as partnering with farmers markets and food pantries to be right at the school
  • bullying (especially for LGBTQ+ and other students in vulnerable situations)
  • “Temporary” portable trailers (which may not have heat or running water and were meant to be temporary but are used long-term).
  • School start times. Researchers have shown that start times can help students succeed better. In one district in Washington, the change in start times decreased the number of students arriving late and first period absences in a lower income school to be comparable with those of students in a higher income school.   

Most off these ideas are more mid-stream solutions to inequities. School nurses also have an important role in addressing inequities upstream. This includes seeking out and advocating for students in underrepresented groups and letting them know about opportunities in the health professions or other career options that can help the next generation. They can help mentor students to take the classes needed to meet their career goals.

To really address root causes of inequities, school nurses must also look at school health policies themselves. Researchers have examined school policies related to inequities in resource distribution and racially biased disciplinary actions, which create a school-to-prison pipeline. Just as policies impact school-to-prison pipeline, do other policies inadvertently create a pipeline for health inequities? Policy work is a pillar of the Center and is one of the next projects it will address.

This list is just a beginning. As school nurses continue to learn more, review their data, and become integrated into school inclusion teams, they will find additional ways to impact student inequities. Addressing inequities early will allow more time for students to reach their full potential.  Learn more about the Center for School Health Innovation & Quality.

Maughan is executive director of the Center for School Health Innovation & Quality, an independent hub to advance data-driven school health through innovation, research and policy. She co-leads a global school nurse researcher consortium and is a board certified advanced public health nurse who advocates for children living in vulnerable populations.

The post Role School Health Addressing Health Inequities appeared first on Campaign for Action.

The last few weeks have seen record surges in COVID-19 infections in most of the country, in large part due to the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Nursing homes are also seeing a rapid surge in cases among both staff and residents, according to weekly data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). There are now more COVID-19 cases in nursing homes than ever before, and deaths are rising as well. Nursing home residents were among the first to be fully vaccinated last year, and the message from recent data is clear: nursing home residents and staff need booster shots now. AARP is calling on nursing homes to require COVID-19 booster shots for residents and staff.

Rapid Surge in Cases

We first see any evidence of the Omicron surge in the nursing home data for the week ending 12/26/2021. Only one week later, there were 42,000 new staff cases, more than any previous week of the pandemic. Over the two most recent weeks of data ending 1/16/2022 there were more than 120,000 new staff cases, as many as the entire month of December 2020, during the previous peak.

Resident cases show the same pattern. Approximately 80,000 new resident cases were reported across the two most recent weeks ending 1/16/2022. These are the two weeks with the most cases of the entire pandemic, surpassing the previous high during last winter’s peak, in which over 40,000 residents died in just two months.

In addition, despite deaths typically lagging behind other indicators, the resident death rate has already begun rising. Deaths remain far below last winter’s rate, but the number of residents dying from COVID-19 has doubled in the last two weeks.

Get Boosted!

One of the most important tools to protect nursing home residents and staff is vaccination. According to the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, about seven out of eight nursing home residents were fully vaccinated as of mid-December, and about half had also received a booster dose. More than four in five health care staff in nursing homes were fully vaccinated, but only one in five had received a booster shot[1].

Booster shots are absolutely critical to maximize protection against the rapidly spreading Omicron variant. Most residents were vaccinated in early 2021 and are due for a booster dose if they have not already received one. While being fully vaccinated without a booster still provides protection against severe illness and death, it is no longer adequate for nursing home residents; a booster is necessary to remain protected. The rate of new infections in nursing home residents who have received a booster dose is more than 90 percent lower than the rate among residents who are not fully vaccinated, or who are vaccinated without an additional booster dose, according to CDC data for the week ending 1/9/2022. AARP is calling on nursing homes to require COVID-19 booster shots for residents and staff: the time is now to get shots in arms.

Delivering booster doses to nursing home residents who need them, and direct care staff who are eligible, should be of highest priority. This means considering a key issue: there is considerable variation in rates of booster uptake by state. As of mid-December, more than three-quarters of nursing home residents were boosted in North Dakota and South Dakota, compared to less than one-third in Arizona and Florida. The rate of staff booster uptake ranged from a low of 11 percent in Indiana to a high of 42 percent in Hawaii. Especially where vaccination and booster uptake are lagging, states must tackle this matter with urgency. Anyone working or living in a nursing home who is eligible for a booster but has not had one should do so as soon as possible.

[1] These numbers are somewhat lower than is reported in other places.  We report the percentage of all residents and all staff who have been boosted; CDC and others typically report the percentage of fully vaccinated individuals that have received a booster dose.  In areas or groups where the vaccination rate is less than 100%, this could appear to overstate the percentage of the total population that is fully protected.

AUTHORS

 

Susan Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, is Senior Vice President and Director of the AARP Public Policy Institute.  She leads the LTSS Choices project and serves as the Chief Strategist for the Center to Champion Nursing in America and Family Caregiving Initiatives. She is the leader of the LTSS State Scorecard and LTSS Choices Initiative to promote the transformation of long-term care. Her areas of expertise include bridging research, policy, and practice in family caregiving; long-term services and supports; and the health care workforce. Read her full biography.

Ari Houser, MA, is a senior methods advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute. His areas of expertise include research methods and statistics, long-term services and supports, demographics, and family caregiving. Read his full biography.

This was originally posted on AARP’s Thinking Policy blog. 

The post Omicron is Hitting Nursing Homes appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Left: Antonia Villarruel, PhD, RN, FAAN. Right: Catherine Alicia Georges, EdD, RN, FAAN

At its October conference, the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) recognized two nurse leaders who are also friends and champions of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for their “outstanding contributions to improve care, advance health equity, and promote the nursing profession.”

Antonia Villarruel, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor and Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, received the Academy’s Health Care Leader Award, which “recognizes an influential national leader dedicated to improving the health of the nation through contributions to organizational excellence.” Villarruel, a co-lead of the Campaign for Action’s Strategic Advisory Committee, was recognized for her work improving the health of under-resourced Latino communities. Dr. Villarruel’s resume is deep and rich. She is a bilingual, bicultural nurse-researcher whose work spans clinical work in a children’s hospital, faculty roles at two universities, developing the widely-used intervention Cuídate (“Take care of Yourself”) for Hispanic teens, and advocating for health equity and diversification of the nursing profession. In addition to serving on the Campaign’s National Strategic Advisory Committee, she is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and directs World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center for Nursing and Midwifery Leadership at Penn Nursing.

The Academy is presenting its Lifetime Legacy Award to Catherine Alicia Georges, EdD, RN, FAAN, Chairperson of the Department of Nursing at Lehman College of the City University of New York. The award recognizes “an extraordinary individual who has dedicated their life to advocating for positive health system changes.” Georges has been a strong supporter of the Center to Champion Nursing, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well as the Campaign for Action. Georges previously served on the AARP board and as AARP’s national volunteer president from 2018-2020. The Academy cited her commitment to eliminating disparities and improving the health of minorities and the disadvantaged in the communities around her, her advocacy for community health and her ongoing mentoring of nurses to achieve greater health equity.

Also this year, the Campaign’s director, Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Marla Salmon, ScD, RN, FAAN, were designated Living Legends by the Academy, and Winifred Quinn, PhD, FAANP(h), the Campaign’s director of advocacy and consumer affairs  was named an honorary fellow.  The awards were presented at the AAN’s Health Policy Conference October 7-9.

The post Trusted Advisors to the Campaign for Action Win Prestigious AAN Awards appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Nurses, nurse leaders, nurse champions and allies from across the country will virtually gather Wednesday to reflect on the profession’s achievements since the release of the 2010 Institute of Medicine report The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health.

More than a decade ago, that report called for nurses to seize the opportunities created by the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of access to care. It described several new capacities the profession would need to realize to achieve the goal of quality health care for all in America.

In 2021, many of those new capacities have been fully activated, while others are well on their way to becoming real. The profession can take pride in being more educated and more influential than ever before. The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action’s dashboard indicators demonstrate this steady progress.

Yet nurses are also well aware that the dream of quality health care for all has not been realized. They are deeply concerned about new challenges like COVID-19 and old enemies like racism and misogyny. They do not want to merely congratulate themselves on their achievements, but figure out new ways to put them to work for those they serve.

A new Future of Nursing report, expected to be released this spring, will further explore these challenges. But in the meantime, Campaign experts are reflecting on the achievements described in the dashboard and what they mean to nurses now.

The Campaign is a national initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation created in 2010 to implement recommendations from the first Future of Nursing report. The Center to Champion Nursing in America, an initiative of those same organizations, runs the Campaign, which is directed by Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior adviser for nursing, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and senior scholar in residence and senior advisor on nursing to the present of the National Academy of Medicine, and Susan C. Reinhard, senior vice president and director, AARP Public Policy Institute and chief strategist for the Center to Champion Nursing in America and Family Caregiving Initiatives.

Diversity in Nursing and Health Equity

Ten years ago, more than 80 percent of the RN workforce was white, and men made up just seven percent of the RN population. The 2010 Future of Nursing report noted these demographic gaps between the nursing profession and the patients it serves. In the years since, diversifying the nursing workforce has become an increasingly important issue for the Campaign of Action as well as other health care institutions.

Kupiri Ackerman-Barger, PhD, RN, FAAN, a Campaign advisor on diversity and inclusion

The dashboard’s latest diversity numbers point to incremental progress on this front, as they have for many years. Kupiri Ackerman-Barger, PhD, RN, FAAN, is associate dean of Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, as well as an associate clinical professor at the University of California Davis Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, and a Campaign advisor on diversity and inclusion. She says it is essential that the nursing profession understands this information in context. Plenty of work still has to be done to achieve a diverse nursing workforce, much less empower that workforce to realize health equity, she said.

“We see these tiny increases in diversity each year,” Ackerman-Barger said. “We are not at a standstill, we are not going backwards, but we need to understand that this is a complex, structural problem that won’t be fixed with incremental change,” she said. “At the rate we are going, it is going to be another fifty years or so before we meet the benchmark of the nursing profession matching the American population — that’s too slow.”

Ackerman-Barger takes hope from the fact that more and more people are understanding the importance of a diverse healthcare workforce — a development she says the Campaign helped bring about.

But now a new conversation needs to begin, she said. The coming decade will require greater critical thinking about the best actions to take to achieve workforce diversity. Issues of race and gender will also need to be understood with greater nuance in order to serve a more diverse population.

“Patients tend to have more satisfaction when they can receive care from someone with a background similar to themselves,” she said. “It’s also an issue of trust. Many communities don’t trust the health care system — for good reasons, historical and current. When we have representation from those communities, that engenders understanding and trust. When patients trust us, they are more likely to communicate with providers or be part of a plan for disease prevention.”

This will require innovation in data collection and program development. For example, Ackerman-Barger points out that while the nursing workforce is becoming more diverse as a whole, there is also stratification in the opportunities available for different groups. While the Campaign has successfully pushed for more baccalaureate-trained nurses, these graduates tend to be more white than the nursing population as a whole. Meanwhile, licensed vocational nurses (LVN) are disproportionately people of color.

“We have to better understand that pipeline,” she said. “It’s a matter of equity, because the LVN positions do not pay as much, they often work long hours in long-term care facilities, and they have a much harder path for career growth. I love our dashboard, but that complexity is currently missing.”

Along with colleagues from the Campaign, Ackerman-Barger recently hosted a Health Equity Action Forum that explored the opportunities and challenges for new nurses from historically underrepresented groups. She explained that looking at the issue of men in nursing can help illuminate the complex interplay of race, gender, and other factors that the profession will need to understand moving forward.

Men are still an underrepresented population in nursing. According to the dashboard, graduates of pre-licensure RN programs are 13.9 percent male, while the population of the United States is 49.2 percent male.

Yet Ackerman-Barger points out that just because men are underrepresented, this does not mean that they are underserved. In fact, there appears to be an opportunity gap in nursing similar to the ones in other fields.

“We need to have conversations about what it means to be a man in nursing and how we need to buck gender stereotypes,” Ackerman-Barger said. “But we also need to acknowledge that men in nursing tend to make more money and get hired into prestigious positions at a higher rate than women do.”

Among other subjects, participants in the Health Equity Action Forum considered how to recruit more Black men into nursing — an opportunity to significantly advance health equity, Ackerman-Barger said.

“It’s a really important conversation,” she said. “In nursing, we have a small number of men and a small number of people of color, so the number of Black men is tiny. Yet when it comes to health disparities, there are so many issues that are particular to Black men and where we need to have the perspective of Black men in talking about what is missing from our policies, research, and curricula.”

This conversation gave Ackerman-Barger hope for what the next decade of conversations about diversity in nursing could look like, she said. Plans for the future of the dashboard’s health equity metrics include adding new demographic indicators like LGBTQ status. But just as important will be understanding the greater vision for social justice this data should inform.

“One mistake people can make is thinking that any one of these things is the answer,” she said. “Doing something like recruiting more Black men into nursing won’t make health disparities go away on its own. We need to acknowledge that we are addressing racial differences in health outcomes that in some cases start as early as pre-school. So all of these efforts are just strands in the effort to fix a complicated system.”

Education and Leadership

Perhaps the most widely recognized outcome of the 2010 report was the shift to bachelor’s level education in nursing. Less than half of the RN workforce in 2010 held a bachelor’s degree. Today, it has increased to more than 59 percent. Patricia Polansky, RN, MS, director of program development and implementation for the Center to Champion Nursing in America, says that increase has led to a critical “tipping point.”

Patricia Polansky, RN, MS, director of program development and implementation for the Center to Champion Nursing in America

“Academic progression has become a formal movement in the profession,” Polansky said. “That did not exist prior to the 2010 report. All aspects of nursing became involved, and we’ve really seen lots of truly innovative ways to transform nursing education and generate more baccalaureate degree nurses.”

The emphasis on greater education has helped the profession respond to problems no one could imagine in 2010, Polansky argued.

“The committee rightly saw that the complexity of health care was increasing and we would face enormous challenges going forward, so we would need a more highly educated nursing workforce,” she said. “Obviously COVID-19 and everything else that has happened in the past year has proven that that is true.”

Doctoral education for nurses was also an important goal of the 2010 report. The dashboard shows that the profession has succeeded on this indicator more than anyone could have imagined. The report called for a doubling of doctorally trained nurses by the end of the decade. But because of the explosion in advanced practice doctorate programs, the number has increased by more than 350 percent.

Polansky said doctorally trained nurses have important contributions to make to American health care.

“Every profession needs PhDs, and we should be proud that we achieved that goal,” she said. “But we now also have doctorally prepared people in every clinical setting under the sun. That is going to make us more ambitious about policymaking and leading change. It will have an exponential impact.”

Nurses are also making a new kind of impact through service on institutions’ boards and other leadership groups. This was one of the report’s most innovative recommendations, Polansky said. She called the data on nurses’ board participation before 2010 “abysmal.”

But this year the dashboard showed that the number of nurses registered as board members and serving on other leadership groups reached more than 10,000 for the first time.

“Nurses are naturally born problem-solvers — tenacious, tireless,” Polansky said. “You see that in all kinds of clinical settings. Those are qualities that people need on boards and committees and task forces. If we had more nurses in leadership, we might not have terrible public health situations like we saw with the water in Flint, Michigan.”

The general public may not be as aware of nurses’ educational and leadership achievements as Polansky would like. But she said that in the aggregate, the past decade’s advances will help the profession stay worthy of patients’ trust.

“When patients interact with a nurse, they may not know their education level or professional training,” she said. “But they feel the competence that is required for the situation in which they need care. It all goes back to that idea of nursing as the most trusted profession, which the public has voted us year after year. Everybody knows what a nurse is, who a nurse is — it’s that person who will care for you from before you are born until the day you die.”

Access to Care

Another significant dashboard indicator focuses on how many people have access to that high-quality nursing care. The Center to Champion Nursing in America, housed at AARP, constantly has its eyes on how many states allow advanced practice registered nurses to practice to the full extent of their education and expertise. In 2020, significant progress was made in new laws passed by California, Florida and Massachusetts.

The most important change occurred at the federal level. The 2020 CARES Act allowed nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, and physician assistants to certify for Medicare-supported health care. Prior to this law, APRNs’ patients had to wait for a physician to certify that home health care was required.

Winifred V. Quinn, PhD, FAANP(H) director of advocacy and consumer affairs at the Center to Champion Nursing in America

These changes will result in material improvements to patients’ lives, said Winifred V. Quinn, PhD, FAANP(H) director of advocacy and consumer affairs at the Center to Champion Nursing in America.

“From the patient experience, a delay of care could lead to unnecessary visits to the emergency room or unnecessary hospitalizations, perhaps worse,” Quinn said. “This is about you being able to get the care when and where you need it. You should be able to see your nurse practitioner and obtain all necessary care without delay during and following that visit.”

For Quinn, these improvements in California, Florida, Massachusetts and at the federal level represent an important achievement that builds upon a decade advocating for reform in access to care policies.

Yet while every change in state and federal laws is important, Quinn argued, just as significant is the narrative the Campaign constructed around these reforms.

“The access to APRN care issue is typically framed as a binary one — nurses versus physicians,” she said. “But we see it as a consumer access to care issue. When patients obtain care when and where they need it, their health is improved and family caregivers’ stress is reduced.”

This reframing helped win the support of a wide variety of stakeholders across the political spectrum, Quinn said.

“Free enterprise organizations, consumer groups, hospitals associations, insurers, and retail clinics have all supported state legislation modernizing APRN laws,” she said.

All of this work resulted in a messaging platform that helped drive advocacy in states where advocates had not previously succeeded.

The work of access to care reform will continue for years to come. Quinn is thrilled by the fact that last year’s reforms brought the total number of states with full access to care to 23. These states include 71.8 million people. The other 27 states and 257 million Americans who do not have direct access to APRN care are never far from her mind.

“Policymakers need to understand that this is an access to care issue, not a power struggle between two clinical sectors, especially when hundreds of thousands of Americans have unnecessarily died this year,” she said.

This type of thinking will also be essential in connecting the Campaign’s legislative agenda to emerging issues of health equity, many of which are expected to be highlighted in the upcoming Future of Nursing report.

“The opposition is making the argument that by modernizing APRN laws, people in underserved communities will receive second-class care,” Quinn said. “That is immoral. With the egregious health disparities that exist in the nation, we must deploy and make available every highly-skilled clinicians to ensure that all people, especially those who experience the worst disparities, receive high quality care when and where they need it.”

Dashboard data analysis by Nicole Rozko, MS, project manager at the Center to Champion Nursing in America. 

The post Looking back to look forward appeared first on Campaign for Action.

The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action is pleased to announce that 12 of its state-based Action Coalitions, or in a few cases, organizations designated by an Action Coalition, have been selected to each receive awards up to $25,000 for new or ongoing work that addresses nursing’s role in building a Culture of Health and promoting health equity. The 2019 Innovations Fund award winners’ plans also demonstrate the importance of collaboration with diverse stakeholders.

“As trusted providers on the front lines of care, nurses have a unique understanding of the needs of their communities,” said Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior adviser for nursing at RWJF and director of the Campaign for Action. “These states are demonstrating how nurses are taking that important perspective and using it to implement innovative programs to address the social determinants of health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is committed to providing states with the support they need to lead efforts that promote health equity and well-being.”

Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior vice president and director of the AARP Public Policy Institute, and chief strategist at the Center to Champion Nursing in America, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and RWJF, which coordinates the Campaign for Action, added:

“We are pleased to support the important work of our Action Coalitions and other organizations with this funding opportunity. Since the days of Florence Nightingale, nurses have been making people and communities healthier. Our hope is that each of these organizations will use these funds to continue their work to build a Culture of Health in their state.”

The winners and their proposals are:

Florida

The Big Bend Area Health Education Center, in partnership with the Florida Action Coalition, seeks to develop and deliver a comprehensive community health worker (CHW) training program for the Big Bend area of Florida. Through collaboration with community partners, they will develop a curriculum to prepare nurses and CHWs to meet the healthcare needs of an underserved population and address health disparities in the region.

Indiana

The Indiana Center for Nursing, which houses the Indiana Action Coalition, created the Indiana Nursing Education, Engagement, and Diversity Statewide Initiative (NEEDS) to ensure Indiana has a diverse healthcare workforce that represents the communities it serves.  In collaboration with diverse partners, NEEDS aims to create a holistic admission toolkit to enhance representation of traditionally underrepresented groups. Additionally, it will design and implement a mentoring program, See Me, Be Me, Be Yourself, for students to be able to see themselves as successful nursing students and as nurses entering the workforce.

Maryland

Johns Hopkins Home Care Group, in partnership with the Maryland Action Coalition, will launch the Cross-Continuum Fellowship (CCF) program to help prepare nurses for changes in care settings (the movement of care from hospital to community). The fellowship will ensure participants are given proper exposure to and training in the social determinants of health that contribute to health inequity. It will also build a sense of community by engaging participants in the Baltimore area.

Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Action Coalition will build on its previous Innovations Fund award by providing nurse facilitators and others appropriate resources to educate students about the dangers of vaping. The Action Coalition will work with representatives of partner organizations to create an evidence-based and adaptive curriculum based on existing state and national resources. The goal of the project is to evaluate and disseminate vaping curriculum to school systems throughout the state.

Missouri

The Missouri Action Coalition’s project will build upon previous work and focus on recruiting advanced practice students and nurses to participate in trainings, including online modules, designed to address population health concepts and increase nursing capacity to support the advancement, efficiency, and sustainability of care providers. The initiative will promote policies, practice, and technology that increase access to equitable and exceptional care, and will encourage a continuum of services using best practices that improve wellness outcomes.

Montana

Montana State University’s “Reaching Rural” project will develop an online learning community for rural, frontier, and tribal nurses in Montana. The initiative will provide continuing education and professional leadership development with a focus on topic areas that incorporate Culture of Health and health equity principles, including chronic disease prevention and control; adverse childhood experiences, effects on health, and trauma-informed care; mental health and substance abuse; interprofessional practice; integrated behavioral health management and practice; rural health leadership; building cross-sector collaborations; and health equity.

Nebraska

The Nebraska Action Coalition will focus on three projects designed to address health equity in under-resourced areas through innovative programs that focus on housing and access to health and health care. They will 1) pilot a project with a local community organization to address chronic health issues by improving housing stock, 2) build on previous work to collect baseline data on nurses working with community health workers, and 3) pilot a mentoring project to support nurse aides.

Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Action Coalition’s project, a podcast series titled “At the Core of Care,” is an effort to showcase the stories that highlight how nurses are improving health by focusing on enhancing consumers’ experience in the health care system. They also plan to increase marketing efforts and revenue generation for the podcast.

Rhode Island

The Rhode Island Action Coalition seeks to reduce stigma and increase “whole-person health” for those suffering from substance-abuse disorders by creating professional development opportunities aimed at stigma-reduction training. The team also plans to organize community support for those seeking to recover from substance abuse. e initiative will expand the Action Coalition’s cross-sector network, while engaging nurse leaders, to raise community awareness, scale successful programs, and improve hiring practices that address stigma reduction.

Virginia

The Virginia Action Coalition aims to promote mental health awareness by convening nurses and behavioral health professionals to discuss opportunities to dissolve barriers to equitable, quality mental health care throughout Virginia’s communities. The Action Coalition will also work with community organizations to develop a program aimed at reducing mental health stigma in economically disadvantaged kindergarten-12 schools in the state.

Washington

The Washington Action Coalition seeks to build on previous research showing Washington nurses are eager to promote a Culture of Health in their communities, but want additional guidance around implementation. The Action Coalition will work with motivated health care facilities in the state to create action plans for nurses to address the social determinants of health at the point of care, and to track key performance indicators following the implementation of these action plans.

West Virginia

The West Virginia Action Coalition aims to collaborate with cross-sector partners to promote nurse-led health businesses among student nurses with the goal of improving community access to care and stimulating local economies. The team will develop and pilot a nurse entrepreneur curricula for integration into bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate nursing programs and create a manual for distribution and dissemination.

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Winifred V. Quinn, director, advocacy and consumer affairs at the Center to Champion Nursing in America, left, Congresswoman Lauren Underwood (IL), center, and Patricia A. Polansky, director, program development and implementation at CCNA, right.

The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action was pleased to join the Nursing Community Coalition to host a reception March 7 to welcome the 116th Congress, celebrating its nurses and Nursing Caucus. US Rep. David Joyce, co-chair of the House nursing caucus, US Rep. Lauren Underwood, Congress’ newest nurse and US Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a nurse champion, attended and gave remarks. “Nurses belong in these hallways…and must engage,” Underwood said.

Susan C. Reinhard, RN, PhD, FAAN, senior vice president and director, AARP Public Policy Institute and chief strategist, Center to Champion Nursing in America, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation welcomed guests and Paul Kuehnert, DNP, RN, CPNP, associate vice president – program RWJF also shared remarks.

Below are some photos from the event. Click on the photo to enlarge and to read the caption.

All photos are credited to Mary Boyle except for the one of Scott Tanaka and Jazmine Cooper. That photo is credited to Winifred Quinn. 

The post Welcoming the 116th Congress appeared first on Campaign for Action.

The mission of the Nurses on Boards Coalition is to improve the health of communities and the nation through the service of at least 10,000 nurses on boards by 2020.

Learn more about @NursesonBoards goal of getting #10kNurses on boards by 2020 by visiting: www.nursesonboardscoalition.org/ #RNsBeCounted

Thank you.

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