Federal policy makers are taking much-needed steps to bolster the nation’s health care workforce for the first time in years.

In 2021, largely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress advanced several major pieces of legislation intended to strengthen the nursing workforce, improve health care access and advance health equity. These actions would provide the largest infusion of federal funding to grow and strengthen the nursing workforce in recent history; they would advance the work of theFuture of Nursing: Campaign for Action and speed implementation of the National Academy of Medicine’s Future of Nursing 2030 report recommendations. And Congress is still considering major additional steps that if enacted, would substantially advance health equity through nursing.

The Campaign has reviewed the nursing provisions in legislation enacted in 2021 (and currently being implemented), as well as those that have passed the U.S. House of Representatives and are still under consideration by the U.S. Senate.

Here they are: 2021-22 Federal Policy Changes Related to Nursing

The post 2021 Nursing-Related Federal Policy Changes; 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. 

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As we find ourselves in the midst of another COVID-19 surge with hospitals once again reaching capacity, there has been much discussion about COVID-19 vaccination and whether this had become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” What might surprise some is the rate of vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers, many of whom have been on the frontlines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vaccine hesitancy is defined by the World Health Organization as a “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability.” Despite the availability of multiple highly effective and safe COVID-19 vaccines and the prioritization of healthcare workers for early vaccination, an August 2021 report from the COVID States Project found that 27% of healthcare facility employees remain unvaccinated. In long term care facilities like nursing homes where residents are among those most vulnerable to severe COVID-19 infection and death, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data through April 4, 2021 show that only 56.8% of long term care facility healthcare workers were vaccinated against COVID-19. The same CDC data showed the lowest rates by profession were for nurses (56.7%) and aides (45.6%). A July 2021 survey of almost 5,000 nurses conducted by the American Nurses Association found that 1 in 8 nurses have not been vaccinated against COVID-19.

Some of the most high-profile cases of unvaccinated healthcare workers include 117 Houston Methodist Hospital staff members who sued to overturn the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and a COVID-19 outbreak at a Kentucky skilled nursing facility that was traced back to an unvaccinated employee. Nurses’ COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has even led to the delay of patient care such as when all four nurses at a Kansas County Health Department refused to administer COVID-19 vaccines to the public.

It is of particular importance that nurses are commonly the most vaccine hesitant members of the healthcare workforce. Nurses have been named the most trusted profession in the U.S. for the last 20 years and have high levels of direct patient contact. Most people in the U.S. also cite their personal healthcare providers as their most trusted source of COVID-19 vaccine information. Not only are vaccine hesitant nurses highly trusted sources of COVID-19 vaccine (mis)information, but their vaccination status and related likelihood to be infected with COVID-19 can also affect whether a healthcare facility is adequately staffed to provide safe patient care.

However, this is not a COVID-19-specific issue for healthcare workers or nurses. Previous research on the seasonal influenza vaccination practices of hospital workers has found that nurses consistently have the lowest flu vaccination rates of all healthcare worker positions surveyed. In the early COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy research, the trend of nurses having the lowest vaccine intent among healthcare workers continues to hold true. Only assistant nurses and aides had lower rates of COVID-19 vaccine intent. My own research found that California registered nurses surveyed from August 14, 2020 through December 2, 2020 were just as vaccine hesitant as other U.S. West Coast adults based on the Vaccine Attitudes Examination Scale, a validated questionnaire that measures hesitancy toward vaccines in general. Additionally, 29.7% of nurses I surveyed reported that they would be unlikely to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if one were available.

I worry how vaccine mandates and healthcare workers’ vaccine hesitancy may affect staffing in the coming months at hospitals and nursing homes, where short staffing has been commonplace long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospital CEOs have gone on record sharing the calculus they face of whether they will lose more employees to COVID-19-related illness and quarantine than the number who would quit in response to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Already, Nebraska is specifically targeting unvaccinated nurses to fill staffing shortages at state facilities by advertising their lack of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. What will this mean for states with healthcare worker vaccine mandates or the nursing home industry? Will there be a great migration of healthcare workers to states without vaccine mandates? Will healthcare workers leave the field or retire to avoid mandated vaccination? Answers to these questions will be especially relevant to healthcare in the U.S. as we approach cold and flu season when hospitals are historically more heavily impacted.

Linda Vuong, MS, RN, CCRN, is a pulmonary hypertension nurse coordinator at UC Davis Health who studies vaccine hesitancy among nurses.

The post Nurse Vaccine Hesitancy Isn’t Surprising appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Cover of the Color of Wellness Magazine July 2021 issue 7.

In the midst of a pandemic that was killing Black people at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts, Michelle Greene Rhodes (MHS, RN, CMCN) found herself wondering what she could do.

Rhodes saw her fellow nurses doing everything from contact tracing to intubations, but her skill set was a little different. Following a career as a specialist in managed care, Rhodes had built a practice helping her fellow nurses become speakers, authors, and entrepreneurs. Now she saw an opportunity to use the network she had built to address the inequities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the outcome of her efforts wasn’t a community clinic or a scientific paper. Instead, it was a glossy magazine: The Color of Wellness, a magazine led by Black nurses that focuses on the health needs of the Black community.

“When I saw my colleagues out there on the frontlines, I went through a period of guilt when I first starting seeing the pictures and stories of horror,” Rhodes said. “My nursing background was in managed care. The common theme is looking at data, looking at prices, looking at health care costs. I believe the Lord turned on a light for me and said, use that.”

Rhodes imagined a magazine organized around the audiences and themes that lead to the most entrenched health problems for the Black population. She decided to recruit a nurse for each theme, seeking out leaders using resources she had developed over her career (such as a Facebook group for nurses interested in entrepreneurship).

“I was thinking about what would make the biggest impact when we released this to communities,” she said. “We needed someone to think about teens, someone to think about women, someone to think about men, someone to think about the military, and so on.”

Since January, Rhodes and her team have produced seven issues of The Color of Wellness. Topics addressed include everything from mental illness and work-life balance to tips on sunscreen and vacation planning.

The common theme is encouraging wellness behaviors that can prevent some of the most persistent chronic health issues Rhodes saw in her managed care career. But she is also considering how to more explicitly address health equity in future issues.

Michelle Greene Rhodes, MHS, RN, CMCN

“I believe we provide a solution to health inequity because we can relay the right messages but still remain relatable to the communities that we serve,” Rhodes said.

Health equity is also central to Rhodes’s expansion plans for the magazine and related efforts. She envisions the same team of nurses that designed the magazine’s core content delivering workshops on the same themes in vulnerable communities. She also hopes to work with health systems who could use the magazine as a way to connect with patients and other stakeholders.

“I don’t just want to get this into the hands of diversity and equity officers,” she said. “I’m hoping that The Color of Wellness can help bring institutions closer to the vulnerable communities that they serve.”

Like Rhodes, many nurses are now considering how they can better address health equity through a new phase in their careers. As the latest National Academy of Medicine report on the future of nursing argues, it’s an essential problem for the next decade and beyond.

It’s also a problem Rhodes has pondered in her role as an entrepreneurial coach to nurses. No matter the individual circumstances, she argues, finding the right path requires nurses to do some soul-searching about their core purpose or motivation.

In her case, she says, that motivation comes from the story of her mother, a certified nursing assistant.

“She wasn’t able to fully live out her dreams, so I want to help as many nurses as I can to realize their dreams, and particularly Black nurses,” Rhodes said. “I have been that nurse that didn’t have a voice. There are times when I have been overlooked. We play such a big role in nursing, but a lot of times you don’t see the Black nurse represented.”

Rhodes said she sees her efforts to support Black nurses as part of a broader effort to connect the rising generation of nurses with emerging opportunities. This could require a “paradigm shift” in the way the profession thinks about leadership opportunities, she said.

“How do we refocus nursing on where nurses are now?” she asked. “How do we connect with a generation of nurses who are different from before and help them move into leadership?”

The answers may not be easy, but Rhodes said that based on her coaching experience there is at least one factor every nurse can control: clearly communicating career goals.

“Communicate with your leaders that you want to learn more or move higher,” she said. “Then move forward with all your might.”

The post New Magazine Powered by Black Nurses appeared first on Campaign for Action.

When the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) began its Future of Nursing 2020-2030 study in 2019, disaster preparedness was not on the agenda, but the events of 2020 brought two realities into stark relief: Our institutions need to better prepare most nurses to deal with public health emergencies, and these events exacerbate existing health inequities.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. It didn’t create the conditions that put communities of color at greater risk of serious illness and death, but it took advantage of those conditions to do its worst and left nurses reeling. Many nurses put their own health and safety at risk to care for COVID-19 patients, and many will bear the scars of that experience for years to come.

Could the pandemic response have gone better? Absolutely, which is why the study report, The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Health Equity, calls for bold action to ensure the nursing profession is ready to respond to future crises and ensure health equity remains squarely in view as emergency response plans are made.

In the past decade, 2.6 billion people around the world have been affected by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Nurses have been pivotal in safeguarding the public during and after these disasters, and during public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. They educate and protect people, engage with and build trust with the community, help people prepare and respond, and help communities recover by fostering resilience. To do these jobs well, nursing students need a solid grounding in emergency preparedness, response, and recovery while they are in school; and practicing nurses need regular opportunities to refresh their knowledge and practice their skills.

The report recommends several actions to achieve these goals.

Create a national center for disaster nursing.

The proposed National Center for Disaster Nursing and Public Health Emergency Response would be a home where nurse experts in preparedness could take a strategic look at what the nursing profession needs and develop a unified plan—one that includes education, training, practice, and certification—for better preparing nurses to respond to future emergencies. The center would also create a pipeline of nurse preparedness experts who could be deployed across the United States to start regional centers and foster excellence in disaster nursing and public health and emergency response.

Articulate a national action plan.

Health is regulated at the state level, which can create immense challenges during an emergency that requires nurses to work across state lines. Planning at the national level can make it easier to meet workforce needs when a crisis arises. Additionally, a national action plan can help everyone stay focused on common goals that are critically important during a disaster: lifting up the nursing workforce, providing more preparedness education and training, furnishing nurses with personal protective equipment, and offering them mental health supports.

Expand nurses’ preparedness knowledge and skills.

Preparedness content is minimal in most nursing courses and in nurse licensure exams. The report calls upon the nation’s nursing education associations to lead the effort to integrate missing preparedness content into the curriculum. Schools of nursing, accreditors, and boards of nursing share a collective responsibility for producing newly licensed nurses equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to feel comfortable rendering care during public health emergencies. Expanding nurse licensing examinations to cover nurses’ responsibilities in a crisis will hold these entities accountable.

Engage employers to protect nurses and the public.

Employers have a responsibility to equip all nurses in their workforce with the information and tools they need when a crisis occurs through relevant education, training, and career development opportunities. Too often, chief nursing officers know what needs to be done, but the information doesn’t trickle down to managers and nurses on the frontlines. Inviting those nurses to the table when plans are made and engaging them in periodic drills will strengthen nurses’ ability to respond during public health emergencies. Employers also need to take steps before disasters strike to protect nurses’ health and well-being.

We live in a time when climate change, social unrest, and emerging infectious diseases mean nurses will regularly be called upon to render clinical care under chaotic and ambiguous circumstances. We can no longer afford to be complacent and assume that nurses are prepared to handle these events. We need to take bold action now to ensure our nation’s nurses have the resources they need so they feel adequately prepared to respond.

Enacting the NAM report’s recommendations can empower and help protect frontline nurses during the next public health crisis. Let’s seize this moment to capture the lessons learned by nurses working in the trenches of the COVID-19 response and equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to protect themselves and all of us.

Tener Goodwin Veenema, PhD, RN, FAAN

Veenema is an expert in public health preparedness and a contributing scholar at the Center for Health Security within Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. The NAM commissioned her for its 2030 report to author a chapter on disaster preparedness and public health emergency response (https://www.nap.edu/read/25982/chapter/10). 

The Campaign for Action explored the ways nurses can prepare themselves, their institutions, and their communities for future crises in several earlier blog posts.  Have a look!

The Next Disaster: Are You Ready?

Helping Vulnerable People Before Disasters Strike

Hurricane-Battered Hospital Offers Lessons in Disaster Preparedness

When Disaster Calls, Nurses Respond

As Nurses Prep for Coronavirus, Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak

The post Handling Future Crises Requires Bold Action appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses have played a critical role as frontline caregivers, leaders, and educators. As COVID-19 vaccines are developed, produced, distributed and communities vaccinated, vaccine confidence is critical.

To build that confidence, the Pennsylvania Action Coalition (PA-AC) has partnered with the National Nurse-Led Care Consortium (NNCC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to create a six-part series on vaccine confidence for the Action Coalition’s podcast, “At the Core of Care.” The series features nurse champions sharing their experiences with the vaccine, and the goal is to support nurses and communities in conversations to promote COVID-19 vaccine confidence and to support public health. The Pennsylvania Action Coalition is part of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Throughout the series, we speak to nurses from across the country who are working in health clinics, academia, non-profits, and at the CDC. They share firsthand pandemic experiences and walk listeners through their personal decision-making process to get vaccinated. The nurses also outline steps other nurses can take to become vaccine ambassadors—individuals who actively engage with the community to share accurate and timely information on the COVID-19 vaccine and local vaccination efforts.

We also hear from nurses about how the vaccine was rolled out in their communities and how it’s being received. The speakers share behavioral techniques to build confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine, emphasizing how trust and empathy are crucial to the process and the role of community partnerships in vaccine distribution.

The final episode will be released in the upcoming weeks. This episode will focus on how to be a trusted messenger.

To stay up to date with our podcast series and listen to full episodes, visit the PA Action Coalition website.

“At the Core of Care” is also available on most podcast streaming services, including Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Mankikar is senior program manager, National Nurse-Led Care Consortium

Gonnella is senior director of strategic initiatives, National Nurse-Led Care Consortium

Davood is the Pennsylvania Action Coalition coordinator, National Nurse-Led Care Consortium

The post Nursing Podcast Series Building Vaccine Confidence appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Addressing patients’ unmet social needs has always been an aspect of the practice of nursing. But to meet today’s health equity challenges, nursing schools will need to embrace some bold new ideas and uncomfortable conversations. The new report from the National Academy of Medicine, The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Health Equity, provides a roadmap all nurse educators should use to begin this urgent transformation.

At first glance, the report’s recommendation on health equity and nursing education sounds simple:

“Recommendation 7: Nursing education programs, including continuing education, and accreditors and the National Council of State Boards of Nursing should ensure that nurses are prepared to address social determinants of health and achieve health equity.”

But as the report’s authors explain in Chapter 7: Educating Nurses for the Future, understanding how to fulfill that mandate is no easy task.

Rejecting the idea that ideas like structural racism and social determinants of health can be addressed in a single course, they call for such concepts to be “integrated throughout the curriculum to give nurses a comprehensive understanding of the social determinants that contribute to health inequities.”

The committee also encourages nurses to lean into difficult conversations around the future of the NCLEX, racism in our profession, and the changes that will be required to develop the next generation of nurses.

Core competencies for health equity

The report details the efforts of our colleagues in several nursing education professional organizations who have identified what all nurses should know about health equity, as well as the competencies required for various degrees. The recommendations of the National League of Nursing and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing feature prominently, as well as the desire to add health equity knowledge and skills to the NCLEX exam. Nurse educators would do well to consider this as they redesign curricula for the future.

Three competencies identified by AACN stood out as particularly important to the NAM committee:

Delivering person-centered care to diverse populations

A major driver in health equity efforts is the changing demographics of the United States, which over the next few decades will become more diverse. In response, nursing schools need to help students learn to address the health needs of populations that are different from their own. This will involve helping students see their own biases and adopt an attitude of cultural humility. The report provides further detail on both topics, differentiating them from approaches to cultural difference that educators have taken in the past.

Collaboration across professions

Most nurses already understand that social determinants of health exist outside the clinical environments where many of us work. What many of us have not yet reckoned with is the many different industries and professions we will need to work with to address these challenges — not just physicians and pharmacists, but engineers, housing and transportation experts, activists, and more.

Continually adapting to new technologies

Nurses’ relationship to technology is complex; many of us would rather be spending time talking to our patients instead of recalibrating our hospital’s latest device. But as the committee makes clear, the judicious use of technologies such as telehealth will be essential to addressing gaps in care in the United States. The authors enjoin nurse educators to help students understand both the “promise and perils” of new technology for health equity, ensuring that nurses can constructively inform these technologies’ design and deployment.

These are some of the key ideas the committee believe will shape future nursing syllabi.  But a nursing school is more than a curriculum. It also consists of the community doing the learning and the ways they are being taught.

Making nursing education more inclusive

It has been clear to our profession for some time that to provide adequate care, the nursing workforce needs to reflect the population it serves. Nurse educators have also been aware that this goal cannot be achieved without cultivating a diverse faculty and student body in our institutions.

But what the new Future of Nursing report makes abundantly clear is that marginal demographic improvements will not be enough to realize the goal of health equity. The authors instead challenge us to reimagine nursing schools as fully inclusive institutions.

“Efforts to recruit and educate prospective nurses to serve a diverse population and advance health equity will be fruitless unless accompanied by efforts to acknowledge and dismantle racism within nursing education and nursing practice,” they write.

Vividly describing the isolation and “loss of self” that many students from underrepresented backgrounds experience in nursing school, they call upon all of us to critically examine the culture of our institutions. For example, they challenge the tendency of nursing school faculty to focus exclusively on white nurses as the sources of innovation and progress in the profession, when many other compelling narratives exist. The report also describes a variety of practical steps that can be taken to more effectively recruit and retain nursing students from underrepresented populations.

An even more daunting challenge described by the report is the need to recruit more diverse faculty for nursing schools. Citing research from AACN, the report explains that nursing faculty are still overwhelmingly female (93 percent) and lag behind the student body and workforce in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, with only 17.3 percent from underrepresented groups.

While this is an improvement from the 11.5 percent from underrepresented groups in 2009, achieving a truly representative nursing faculty on the national level will be a major challenge, since we already face significant shortages of nursing faculty in general. The report rightly calls for further intentional action to ameliorate the problem of who will teach the next generation of nurses.

New pedagogies for new skills

When it comes to how to teach future nurses, however, the report is replete with exciting new solutions.

The committee clearly states that traditional pedagogy is not sufficient for the task. The “domains and competencies” needed to address social determinants of health, they write, “cannot be conveyed to nursing students through traditional lectures alone.” In fact, they cite persuasive evidence that suggests that without real-world experience, classroom discussions of social determinants can actually increase negative attitudes toward affected populations.

Fortunately, nurse educators have developed innovative ways to address this problem. Many of these solutions are far more robust than a visit to a community clinic. The authors describe successful models for long-term partnerships with diverse entities such as “federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), public health departments, homeless shelters, public housing sites, public libraries, and residential addiction programs” where nurses can gain experience and community members can benefit.

Any of these relationships could serve as a first step toward the goal envisioned in the Campaign for Action’s Population Health in Nursing report last year: every nursing school should be a participant in a robust population health partnership.

A few exemplary models go even further in realizing that vision. For example, in its graduate programs the University of Washington supplements a year of work in the community with a year of policy work, raising the social change ambitions of its graduates. Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas has transformed its DNP program to focus on social determinants of health through a groundbreaking collaboration with the Topeka Housing Authority.

The report also highlights simulation as an innovative approach to help students understand the work of health equity in a low-risk environment. One example is the Community Action Poverty Simulation, a role-playing activity where students attempt to access resources impoverished patients might need to address social determinants of health. Research cited by the report claims that these exercises increase empathy and understanding of the situation of poverty — a vital skill set if future nurses are going to help the United States achieve health equity.

Glazer was a member of the Committee on the Future of Nursing 2020-2030. She is also dean of the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Nursing and vice president for health affairs at UC.

The post Transforming nursing education to achieve health equity appeared first on Campaign for Action.

   Kristi Alvey, APRN

An educator at Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, Kristie Alvey, APRN used her positive spirit and compassionate attitude to make a meaningful difference in a year when positivity was hard to come by.

Kristie embraced the new challenge of cross-training bedside nurses for med-surg and ICU, while healthcare providers were sick, and units were at capacity. She later helped to open a new clinic to vaccinate between 150 and 500 people per day. Kristie believes her ability to partner with and support her colleagues has proven to be invaluable in supporting the truly monumental task of vaccinating patients and “Kicking Covid to the Curb in 2021,” as is the Clinic’s motto. She is invested in inspiring her colleagues, caring for their health, and making a positive impact on the clinical environment during periods of high stress. By leading with care and compassion, her efforts during the past year have transformed her colleagues’ experience and helped them provide enhanced care to patient.

Tanya Henry, RN

Tanya, the Nurse Manager in the cardiology and medicine clinics, volunteered to oversee the coordination and staffing at a COVID-19 patient entry point on the main campus. She created staffing plans, solicited volunteers and constantly motivated staff to conduct consistent, reliable screenings. She also developed a protocol for testing facilities so that nurses and staff would be better equipped to assess, order, and perform COVID-19 tests. Through her leadership, the VA was able to build a cohesive, high-functioning team in a time of unprecedented need. Thanks to Tanya’s innovative leadership, the entire screening and testing operation for the medical center has been nurse-led and nurse driven.

Forrest Fortier – Retired RN

The artwork featured at the top of the article, titled “The Power of Nursing Through Learning,” is by Forrest Fortier, an artist and retired nurse from South Carolina. Forrest was inspired by her former colleagues to create a series of paintings that captured the strength and resilience of nurses everywhere, particularly during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can learn more about Forrest and her artwork at https://forrestfortier.com/)

The post Meet 3 South Carolina Nurses Who Disrupted Healthcare through the COVID-19 appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Earlier today, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) released its eagerly awaited report, The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity. The report’s dedication to “nurses around the world who paid the ultimate price of caring for people during the COVID-19 crisis” strikes an appropriately solemn note given what has transpired, but the report itself lays out an optimistic and ambitious vision of the future. The authors see nurses taking on “expanded roles…in new settings in innovative ways” and contributing to ushering in “a new era of promoting health equity and well-being for all.”

Mary Wakefield, PhD, RN, FAAN,

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the report examines nurses’ role in achieving health equity—the ability of everyone to attain their full health potential—and in bridging the health and social needs of individuals, families, and communities. “This is a transformational time for the field of nursing,” said Mary Wakefield, PhD, RN, FAAN, visiting professor at Georgetown University and the University of Texas at Austin, who co-chaired the NAM study committee that wrote the report. “Policymakers and health system leaders must seize this moment to strengthen nurse education and training, integrate health equity into nursing practice, and protect nurses’ physical, emotional, and mental well-being, so they can provide the best care possible.”

All of us at the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and RWJF, will be delving more deeply into the report in the coming weeks, and I encourage you to take a look for yourself. For now, here are a few key take-aways:

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

 Nursing is an overwhelmingly white and female profession. To be effective in promoting health equity, nurses need to diversify their ranks. Whether in schools or the workplace, identifying, recruiting, and supporting nurses who reflect the diversity of the U.S. population and enabling them to take on leadership roles is critical to advancing equity. The report emphasizes the need to build partnerships with colleges that serve communities underrepresented in the nursing profession. I’m pleased to note that the Campaign is already engaged in this work, and we know we have more work to do. Noting the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, the report also includes a detailed discussion of racism as a social determinant of health and calls on nurses to acknowledge and dismantle racist structures within the profession.

Education

The report calls on education programs to prepare nurses to advance health equity. Historically, nursing education programs have focused heavily on preparing nurses to work in hospitals. That’s not sufficient if we want nurses to address social determinants of health, among them access to stable housing and adequate food, income, and education. Nursing schools will need to increase community-based learning experiences such as those captured by the Campaign in a 2018 survey of nursing educators. The report also urges schools to teach students to use telehealth and analyze data, skills that can assist them in addressing population health.

Nurses’ Health and Well-Being

The report calls on a range of stakeholders to immediately initiate efforts to promote nurses’ health and well-being, to address current concerns and prepare for future natural disasters and public health emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has left nurses feeling burnt out and unprotected as a result of their experiences in the workplace and incidents of hate and discrimination, particularly against nurses of Asian descent. Nurse leaders and employers have central roles to play in creating healthier work environments and policies that support nurses, but individual nurses, their associations, and policymakers can take steps to promote nurses’ health and well-being as well. The report also notes the potential for increased strain when nurses take on the emotionally taxing work of addressing health inequities and social justice issues, with the burden falling most heavily on nurses from underrepresented groups.

Paying for Nursing

The report stresses the need to reform the ways government and private insurers pay for nursing care so that nurses can devote more attention to disease prevention and other public and community health activities. The report gives a special shout-out to school nurses for the vital role they play in serving children with complex health and social needs. The study’s authors call on state and local governments to identify dedicated funding to ensure all children have access to a nurse while in school, which is sadly far from the case today.

Consonant with its sister report, 2010’s The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, this new report also calls for more nurses to earn PhDs, for all nurses to lead in developing policy, and for the removal of barriers that prevent nurses from practicing to the full extent of their education and training. Not surprisingly, the report also urges the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government entities to take a number of concrete steps to reinforce nurses’ ability to respond to future public health emergencies.

Lisa Marsh Ryerson

Among the other challenges that nurses will face in the next decade, the report notes the care needs of the nation’s aging population. As director of AARP’s Public Policy Institute, these words resonated strongly with me and my colleague Lisa Marsh Ryerson, president of AARP Foundation. “AARP and AARP Foundation began investing in nursing back in 2007 because we knew nurses were essential to advancing health for all Americans. That’s still the case, as the NAM report makes clear, and not just at the bedside,” Ryerson said. “Nurses are powerful allies in AARP’s effort to advocate for vulnerable older populations and communities.”

Edna Kane Williams

Edna Kane Williams, AARP executive vice president and chief diversity officer, also enthusiastically reviewed the report. “The pandemic revealed and exacerbated a range of disparities and injustices for people of color and for older Americans. All people—regardless of age, race, or income—should have access to affordable, patient-centered, quality care,” said Williams.  “The NAM report affirms AARP’s work to diversify the nursing workforce, move towards health equity, and transform the health care system.”

I agree. As we review the report in the coming weeks, we’ll be posting more on its contents and what nurses can do to engage in the effort to advance health equity. I hope you’ll join us!

Reinhard is senior vice president and director of the AARP Public Policy Institute and chief strategist, Center to Champion Nursing in America, also an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and RWJF, which runs the Campaign for Action, and caregiving initiatives.

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Viven Health’s COVID-19 prevention simulation modules are available for free on the company’s website.

Solving problems is in nurses’ DNA. When they implement a “workaround,” we call them creative. When they turn that solution into a business, we call them entrepreneurs. But nurses who launch companies typically bring another dimension to these commercial endeavors: their ethos of caring. Unlike many in the business world, they are “entrepreneurs with heart.”

Tom Ahrens, PhD, RN, FAAN, leads Viven Health, which uses interactive simulations to educate consumers about their health.

That’s the assessment of Viven Health founder Tom Ahrens, PhD, RN, FAAN. Viven Health is a nurse-led company that develops interactive simulation software aimed at educating the public on a wide range of health topics. If a nurse wants to start a business, it has to be about something more than making money, Ahrens says. That’s the case with Ahrens and Viven Health’s Director of Clinical Affairs Natasha Dickinson, MSN, FNP-C. The two are on a mission to engage people in improving their own health.

Ahrens is also an entrepreneur at heart. Early in his nursing career, he developed a closed-system chest-drainage unit to solve the problem of keeping lungs inflated while draining the pleural cavity that surrounds them. He obtained a patent for his invention, marking the first of several forays into business during his career. While a critical care nurse, clinical nurse specialist, and research scientist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, he launched several continuing nursing education ventures. Along the way, he noticed some repeat customers attending his courses. “I knew they liked the class, but they shouldn’t have had to come back a second time. The message wasn’t getting across,” he concluded.

The root of the problem, Ahrens believed, was the traditional lecture, his default teaching method at the time. “If people aren’t engaged in learning, they’re not going to retain information,” he says. That lesson informed the consumer education offered today through Viven Health.

Ahrens believes the key to learning is simulation. For example, a free COVID-19-related learning module on Viven Health’s website allows users to simulate placing cloth, surgical, and N95 masks on faces to see how much they reduce the risk of infection, alone and in combination. Other modules simulate the use of a pulse oximeter and teach users how to protect themselves in the home and when out and about.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made Viven Health’s focus on infection prevention especially relevant this past year, but the idea to create consumer-focused learning modules sprang from an entirely different source. As a critical care nurse, Ahrens was troubled by the rate of sepsis he saw in the intensive care unit. He says that in 80% of cases, this life-threatening condition begins outside the hospital. The problem? People develop infections and wait too long to seek care.

Engaging consumers in interactive scenarios that teach them how to avoid infection in the first place is one of the reasons Ahrens founded Viven Health. Businesses, which are Viven’s chief customers, see the value in this type of education. Sick days cost employers billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, so engaging employees in preventive health behaviors makes good business sense. But Ahrens has a much more ambitious agenda for his company. He wants to put its educational simulations to work to encourage healthy behaviors on a range of fronts and to reach underserved populations with critical health information.

Natasha Dickinson, MSN, FNP-C, will be leading Viven Health’s efforts to reach underserved populations.

That’s where Natasha Dickinson, MSN, FNP-C, comes in. A family nurse practitioner on the brink of completing Doctor of Nursing Practice and Master of Public Health degrees, Dickinson is slated to lead this new effort. Her commitment to working with underserved populations dates back to her first patient encounters as a medical-surgical nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “I realized how much miseducation and how much mistrust there was, especially in the Black community,” she recalls.

Dickinson is excited about merging her nursing knowledge and passion for public health in her current role at Viven Health. At the moment, that means enlisting trusted organizations to disseminate educational modules, which the company is developing to address vaccine hesitancy.

From there, the duo plans to take on a range of conditions—diabetes, asthma, and heart failure among them—that are highly influenced by patient behaviors. They also plan to tackle medication noncompliance, a major source of poor health outcomes, studies say. These findings dovetail with what Dickinson has observed in her own practice, providing health promotion and prevention education to older adults in their homes. “Patients don’t even know what medications they’re taking,” she says, laying the blame on the typical 15-minute office visit, which allows little time for patient education. “We’re going to empower people to take control. That’s what it takes to be healthy,” she says.

Back when she was on the med-surg unit, Dickinson says she saw the same patients over and over. “When they came to the hospital, I felt like we were always trying to put a Band-Aid on the situation. We weren’t taking that extra time to help prevent them from coming back. We have to break that cycle,” she insists. That’s what this entrepreneur with heart says Viven Health’s patient education efforts are all about.

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