This is part of the June 2013 issue of Sharing Nursing's Knowledge.

Summer’s here, and so is murder and mayhem—at least in the pages of a trio of newly released books about nurses.

In Death Without Cause: A Health Care Mystery, a young critical care nurse explores a series of unexplained deaths at the hospital where she works. Written by Pamela Klauer Triolo, PhD, RN, FAAN, the book was released in May to coincide with National Nurses Week.

Another nurse-centered mystery also hit the shelves in May. Bone Pit, featuring lead character Gina Mazzio, a registered nurse (RN), was written by RN Bette Golden Lamb and J.J. Lamb. It follows Sin & Bone and Bone Dry, the first two books in the series.

In the nonfiction department, investigative journalist Charles Graeber tells the haunting story of hospital nurse Charles Cullen. The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder documents Cullen’s crimes against patients and the health care system’s failure to prevent them.

Also in the non-fiction department is a new collection of essays about nursing called I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse. Edited by Lee Gutkind, the book will be featured in the July edition of Sharing Nursing’s Knowledge.

Other new titles—also published in 2013—take an academic approach to hot nursing topics.

Modern Healthcare’s “50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare” this year includes eight alumni of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program. The honorees included on the annual list are chosen by readers and the senior editors of the publication “for their leadership in the varied sectors of the industry, whether provider organizations, government agencies, associations, insurers or supplier companies.”

The Clinical Scholars alumni included this year are:

• Kelvin Baggett, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer, Tenet Healthcare Corp. (Dallas, Texas);
• Mark Chassin, MD, president, Joint Commission (Oak Brook Terrace, Ill.);
• Patrick Conway, MD, chief medical officer, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and director, CMS Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (Baltimore, Md.);
• Elliott Fisher, MD, MPH, director, Center for Population Health and director, Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice (Lebanon, N.H.);
• Gary Gottlieb, MD, MBA, president and CEO, Partners HealthCare (Boston, Mass.);
• Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, president and CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Princeton, N.J.);
• Reed Tuckson, MD, FACP, executive vice president and chief of medical affairs, UnitedHealth Group (Minnetonka, Minn.); and
• Robert Wachter, MD, professor and associate chairman, Department of Medicine, University of California at San Francisco (San Francisco, Calif.).

See the full list.

Ebbin Dotson, PhD, MHSA, is a 2011 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) New Connections grantee. He is executive director for the Health Professions Pathways Initiative at the City Colleges of Chicago. This is part of a series of posts looking at diversity in the health care workforce.

Defining potentiality in my line of work is an opportunity for me to influence and encourage the diversification of the health care workforce. Here at the community college where I work, we serve 120,000 students across seven campuses and seven satellite sites on a daily basis (1). More than 70 percent of these students categorize themselves as being Black and/or Hispanic (2). In addition, we have developed partnerships with more than 100 industries, four-year colleges and universities, and community‐based organizations to help connect our students to real-world educational and work opportunities (3). On this national platform discussing diversity, we have an opportunity to change the future course of health care through our investments in health science education and training at community colleges.

As a health professions pathways researcher, it is my desire to increase the diversity of the health care workforce as a solution toward reducing health disparities. In my opinion, more minorities in the health care workforce will have a positive impact on the care provided to minority consumers of health care. Furthermore, as an RWJF New Connections grantee, it is my role to find ways to recruit and retain health professions students using pipeline programs. So what are the effective strategies that result in a diversified health care workforce?

In the more than two years since the launch of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, state-based coalitions around the country have been working to strengthen the nursing profession to improve health and health care. These Action Coalitions have identified priorities and strategies specific to their states, and forged diverse partnerships to help reach their goals.

A new series of videos on RWJF.org features leaders from some of those Action Coalitions discussing their work and successes, and some of the unique challenges and opportunities they’ve faced.

Watch the videos.

This is part of the May 2013 issue of Sharing Nursing's Knowledge.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has called on nurses to take on more leadership positions so they can use their unique insights to help redesign the nation’s ailing health care system.

But some nurses are already there.

In its biennial list of the 25 most powerful women in the health care industry, Modern Healthcare, a leading health policy journal, included nine women with nursing backgrounds and two others who are vocal champions of nurses and nursing.

Nurses and nursing champions, in other words, comprised nearly half the list, which was released in April.

The following are among the many honors received recently by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows, grantees and alumni.

The Chicago Parenting Program, an innovative program that supports healthy parenting and reduces behavioral problems among children, was recently added to the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. RWJF Executive Nurse Fellow alumna Deborah Gross, DNSc, RN, FAAN, was a driving force behind the program, which is used by Head Start centers in Chicago and New York City, among others.  RWJF Nurse Faculty Scholar Susan Breitenstein, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, and Executive Nurse Fellow alumna Sharon Tucker, PhD, RN, joined with Gross and others to conduct a study on the program, published in Research in Nursing & Health. It was recently named the journal’s Best Research Article award for 2012.

David Kindig, MD, PhD, RWJF Health & Society Scholars program director at the University of Wisconsin, and Health & Society Scholars program National Advisory Committee (NAC) member George Isham, MD, MS, co-chaired the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement, which is exploring factors beyond medical care that affect people's health. Among other participants in the Roundtable: RWJF Senior Program Officer Pamela Russo, MD, MPH, and Health & Society Scholars NAC Member James Knickman, PhD.

RWJF Health Policy Fellows alumna Carmen R. Green, MD, was appointed the University of Michigan Health System’s inaugural Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Health Equity and Inclusion. In the position, Green will find and address inequalities in care, education and research, and promote health care careers to those from groups that are underrepresented in the field.

Sylvia Garcia, JD, a member of the RWJF Community Health Leaders program NAC, was elected to the Texas State Senate (District 6) in a run-off election to fill the seat previously held by the late state Sen. Mario Gallegos.

Have you signed up to receive Sharing Nursing’s Knowledge? The monthly Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) e-newsletter will keep you up to date on the work of RWJF’s nursing programs, and the latest news, research and trends relating to academic progression, leadership, and other critically important nursing issues.  These are some of the stories in the March issue:

RWJF Announces Initiative to Support State Efforts to Transform Health Care through Nursing
RWJF has announced a new $3 million initiative to help states prepare the nursing profession to address our nation’s most pressing health care challenges—access, quality, and cost. The Future of Nursing State Implementation Program will bolster efforts already underway in 50 states and the District of Columbia—the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action—to transform health care through nursing and meet the challenges stemming from an aging and more diverse population. The initiative is providing two-year grants of up to $150,000 to 20 state-based Action Coalitions.

Nation’s Nurse Leaders Convene in D.C.
Nurses and health leaders from across the country assembled in the nation’s capital in early March to advance a national campaign to transform the nursing profession in order to improve health and health care. Hundreds of participants from state Action Coalitions shared ideas and developed plans to move their collective agenda forward at the Campaign for Action National Summit. The summit was designed to help Action Coalition leaders and supporters identify their own priorities and understand those of other Action Coalitions, develop strategic plans to actualize those priorities, come up with new ways to increase their impact, and align state-level work with the national agenda.

More than 200 leaders from state Action Coalitions gathered in Washington, D.C. recently for the 2013 Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action Summit on the Future of Nursing. Watch the video below to hear from some of them about the experience.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, kicked off the Summit by discussing the Foundation’s commitment to transforming health care through nursing. View her conversation with RWJF Senior Communications Officer Linda Wright Moore, MS, in the right-hand sidebar of the blog.

Learn more and see photos from the Summit.

Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Senior Adviser for Nursing and Director, Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action.

After about a year of planning, we held the Campaign for Action National Summit in Washington D.C. in late February and early March. We brought together more than 200 leaders from state Action Coalitions—nurses, other health leaders, consumers, educators, business leaders and others who are working at the state level to advance nursing and improve health care. These Action Coalition leaders are experts and activists who came to Washington to share innovative ideas for transforming health care and improving health, and to plan for the future. 

The mission of the Campaign for Action and its Action Coalitions, which are in every state and the District of Columbia, is to advance recommendations from the Institute of Medicine’s landmark report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. Those recommendations cover a range of issues, including academic progression, nurse leadership, scope of practice, workforce data collection, diversity, and much more. Our goal, in all this work, is to ensure that nurses can contribute as equal partners in a reformed health care system in order to improve patient care.

We planned the Summit as a nontraditional conference that used a U.N.-style approach. It was designed to allow participants—who are from nursing, medicine, business, health systems, philanthropy, and academia—to learn from each other.

For more than four decades, the grantmaking of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has advanced the nursing profession, supporting nurses in their efforts to improve care and strengthening nurses’ role in shaping the future of the nation’s health care system. The latest issue of Charting Nursing’s Future, RWJF’s periodic series of issue briefs, tracks the Foundation’s growing commitment to nursing.

The brief examines RWJF’s impact in five distinct areas:

• Expanding roles for nurses;
• Building educational capacity;
• Demonstrating nurses' contributions to quality and safety;
• Creating leaders for the 21st century; and
• Bridging gaps in research and data.

Among the two dozen past and present programs highlighted in the brief:

• Expanding roles. In the mid-1970s, RWJF played a critical role in the emergence and acceptance of nurse practitioners (NPs), supporting demonstration projects in rural areas of California, Alabama, Tennessee and New England. Subsequently, RWJF’s Nurse Faculty Fellowship Program helped create an intellectual home for primary care nursing, leading to the creation of master’s degree NP programs across the nation.