Dean Potempa's Fall Newsletter: All the Important Conversations

Submitted on Sep 27, 2013

Nursing education expands in the era of health care reform.

Updates:

It's a meaningful time of year in the higher-education world, when our first-year nursing students arrive on campus to begin their studies. We also welcomed returning students, including the inspiring University of Michigan School of Nursing (UMSN) graduate students. We have great hopes for these future leaders we are mentoring, because they must educate tomorrow's nurses, research solutions for endless challenges, and find new and better ways to promote health and well-being.

When Michigan signed Medicaid expansion into law in mid-September, I saw it as a chance to call again for action in Michigan allowing advanced practice nurses to work to the full extent of their training. "One good expansion deserves another" is how we're framing this conversation, because clearly hundreds of thousands of newly insured Michigan residents will require the services of more clinicians, especially in the already taxed area of primary care.

Assistant Professor Chris Friese, PhD student Amanda Schuh, and Brigadier GeneraAs a forum for more conversation on health care and reform, our school on Sept. 17 participated in the national day of screening for the documentary "Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare." A standing-room-only crowd showed up and stayed for conversation with a panel of UMSN faculty, alumni, and a doctoral student. By hosting this event, we provided an opportunity for diverse professionals--working nurses, insurance brokers, med students--to come together and share their hopes and concerns about what's happening now, and next, in health care.
 
Communication is so key to health promotion and good care. So here's a great new resource I hope you'll share with your constituencies: The Family Gene Toolkit. It's an educational program dedicated to helping families with an identified BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation and their untested relatives have meaningful discussions about genetic mutations and make informed decisions about genetic testing. Developed by Dr. Maria Katapodi, PhD, RN, FAAN, it includes live Internet sessions with a genetic counselor and an oncology nurse as well as follow-up phone calls.
 
Advanced care, also known as palliative care, is another topic we need to be addressing. As I told HealthLeaders in September, "We don't always deal with the issues of death and dying very effectively in our culture. When you have a very seriously ill person, a physician is trained to do everything to save a life, and the family may be hoping that one more thing.... We don't step back and think of it from a humanistic perspective--we are trained healers, and we forget that dying is a natural part of the human experience. Too often, we're not letting the person align with the spiritual side of letting go--physically, emotionally, and psychologically--which is important for a peaceful death."

Let's keep leading these difficult discussions. If nurses don't, who will?
 

Kate Potempa, Dean
University of Michigan School of Nursing