WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) is pleased to announce that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $386,000 in new funding to engage hospital leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) in the innovative work underway to improve healthcare quality and patient safety. This generous award will extend the reach of AACN’s national faculty development program, which is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as Phase III of the Quality and Safety Education for Nursing (QSEN) initiative, to include colleagues from the practice arena along with nursing faculty. In addition, funding will be used to support the rigorous evaluation of curriculum enhancement efforts at SFBA schools as well as student learning using the QSEN competencies as the framework.
“By bringing service and education leaders together, AACN is enhancing the pre-licensure nursing curriculum and better preparing new RNs to deliver safer and higher quality patient care in the Bay Area,” said Stacy Walder, Program Officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “The Foundation is pleased to support this important, high-impact program.”
“Building strong partnerships between nursing schools and hospitals is an effective mechanism for fostering collaboration and innovation around shared educational interests,” said Geraldine “Polly” Bednash, AACN’s CEO and Executive Director. “AACN applauds the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their commitment to strengthening the bond between academic and practice institutions in the interest of enhancing nursing education and improving patient safety.”
Since January 2010, AACN has been hosting a series of 8 regional QSEN Faculty Development Institutes for nurse educators working to develop quality and safety competencies among graduates of entry-level registered nursing programs. These enrichment opportunities give nurse faculty the training and information needed to improve curricula with a focus on QSEN’s six core competencies: patient-centered care; teamwork and collaboration; evidence-based practice; quality improvement; patient safety; and informatics. Using a train-the-trainer model, program participants are expected to educate and mentor their faculty colleagues in the teaching of quality and safety concepts. The final three QSEN institutes are scheduled to take place later this year in Boston (June), Seattle (September), and Charleston, SC (November).
In addition to these institutes, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation provided funding for a ninth institute at the Foundation’s conference center in Palo Alto, CA on June 9-11, 2010. Nursing schools offering associate degree, baccalaureate, and/or entry-level master’s degrees in nursing located within the 10-county San Francisco Bay Area attended the event.
To build on this successful convening of academic nurse educators, AACN and the Foundation are now extending their outreach in the San Francisco Bay Area to include three follow-up meetings with the 75 nurse faculty who attended the June 2010 meeting along with 110 practice colleagues from 67 local area hospitals. With events planned each year through 2013, the first joint academic-practice QSEN meeting is scheduled for June 15-16, 2011 in Palo Alto. Bringing academic and practice leaders together will help to ensure the success of the original SFBA QSEN Faculty Development Institute and facilitate ongoing dialogue and support for schools moving to update their curricula and strengthen student learning opportunities.
The new grant funding also will be used to thoroughly assess the impact of the QSEN faculty development effort on nursing program curriculum and student competency in the San Francisco Bay Area. Expert consultants will work with AACN and the Foundation to identify methods and criteria to assess the impact of the faculty training and QSEN content integration over time. In addition, project staff are developing a comprehensive evaluation plan to confirm the incorporation of the QSEN competencies into nursing program curricula.
To learn more about AACN’s QSEN Education Consortium and the regional faculty development institutes, see http://www.aacn.nche.edu/qsenec. For more details on the national QSEN movement, see http://www.qsen.org.