When nurses are empowered to create health equity in their communities, they bring together a network like nobody else can.

The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has demonstrated this principle through its Nursing Innovations Fund that supports the Campaign’s state-based Action Coalitions in creating replicable and promising solutions for improving health equity through nursing.

The Nursing Innovations Fund was also designed to spark collaboration with partners outside of nursing. One condition of the award is that applicants must seek matching funds from other organizations. In combination with other tools to engage local stakeholders, the awards have led to an impressive array of new multi-sector relationships, helping nurses discover new allies for creating better access to care and services.

Launched in 2018, the Nursing Innovations Fund has led to new projects in 23 states. The Campaign has awarded more than $850,000 to a wide variety of initiatives, with every dollar being matched by other funders. This blog highlights the collaborations and projects from the 2019 and 2020 cohorts representing 17 states, whom created over a dozen publicly accessible tools to be used for building health equity. All of the resources are available on the Campaign website.

State coalitions secured investment from multiple organizations that understand why it is so important to invest in better access to care and services. They include organizations one might expect, such as hospitals, nursing schools, and regional philanthropies. Action Coalitions also secured funding from unexpected sources:

• In Georgia, funding from the Clayton County Fire and Emergency Services helped create more effective paths for Black men to enter nursing.  
• In Kentucky, the Kentucky Beef Council supported an initiative to prevent suicide in the farming community, and
• In Nebraska, Scoular, an agriculture supply chain company, contributed matching funds to a project aimed at improving health equity.

In addition to funders, Action Coalitions garnered critical support from community partners representing dozens of different organizations. Here are a few of their stories:

• In Pennsylvania, a podcast highlighting nurses in health equity roles featured many local partners, including Sanctuary Farm, a program that converts abandoned areas in Philadelphia to farm plots.
• In Washington, a program to bring culturally appropriate food and essentials to older Filipino community members worked with local and national groups such as the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns.
• In Indiana, nurses from the Indiana Center for Nursing collaborated with the AARP state office to enable nursing schools across the state to implement holistic admissions programs

Crucial to the impact of these projects is the idea that all of them can provide insights that help many other organizations disrupt disparities and improve access to care and services.

Actions Coalitions drew on well-established tools to address health disparities, including the Campaign’s Heath Equity Toolkit and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Healthy People 2030. In turn, many of them developed new resources to help others:

• In Wisconsin, the Action Coalition developed a curriculum to improve nurses’ disaster response capabilities, and it is being shared throughout the state.
• In Massachusetts, nurses developed an anti-vaping resource kit for use in public schools.
• The Pennsylvania initiative centers on a podcast that helps nurses envision new careers in health equity.

Together, these partnerships, resources, and insights add up to a powerful network working to achieve health equity in the U.S. built on strengthened nursing capacity and expertise, as the National Academy of Medicine’s Future of Nursing 2020—2030 report has envisioned.

In the coming weeks, this Campaign blog will feature more detailed explorations of how this work brought together local and state coalitions to address health equity. Projects to be featured include:

• Indiana – This project brought together partners including AARP Indiana State office and Orbis Education to help nursing programs implement holistic admissions and peer-to-peer mentoring for the Nursing Education, Engagement, and Diversity Statewide Initiative, or NEEDS.
• Kentucky – The Kentucky Nurses Action Coalition enlisted school nurses to address the state’s disproportionate suicide rate, culminating in a dramatic presentation designed with the Actors Theater of Louisville. Title: School Nurses to BARN Camp for the Mental Health and Wellness of Kentucky Youth.
• Massachusetts – This project addressed vaping in youth in partnership with education and law enforcement groups from across the state, yielding new curricula to aid teachers in elementary and secondary schools. Title: Promoting Health Literacy to Influence Health and Wellness of Students in the Community: Widening the Connections.
• North Carolina – Working with the North Carolina Action Coalition, the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University developed a new model of coalition-building to help African American and rural communities. Title: Project RARE (Reciprocal, Authentic, Relationships for Equity).
• Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Nurses Center explored gaps in the state’s emergency preparedness plans, then developed a training to help nurses address the problems. Partners included nursing schools as well as the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative and the Wisconsin Primary Health Care Association. Title: Preparing Wisconsin Nurses to Address the Needs of Vulnerable Populations in a Public Health Emergency.

Previous blog entries have also explored Nursing Innovations Fund programs in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Are you interested in addressing health equity in ways like the Campaign’s Action Coalitions? Visit the Nursing Innovations Fund page for a complete list of programs as well as the Campaign resources nurses used to create them.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyone’s lives in different ways. But in Wyoming, one Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action state-based coalition has figured out how to use those disruptions as an opportunity for innovation, community building and managing health.

As the pandemic hit in 2020, nursing homes in the state and across the nation adopted strict visitor policies to limit the spread of the disease. This exacerbated social isolation — already a serious problem for America’s seniors. And, it also made it impossible for nursing students to complete clinical rotations at those nursing homes.

Jeanine Niemoller, RN, MS, director of the Wyoming Center for Nursing, came up with a solution.

Using funds from a Campaign for Action Nursing Innovations Fund award, Niemoller found a way to provide clinical experience for nursing students while also helping older Americans use technology. The Wyoming center had been ready to execute a plan for nursing students to teach older Wyomingites technology skills so they could access telehealth services from their residences. When COVID-19 made it impossible to visit people in their homes, the center instead partnered with the state’s AARP office to help nursing students provide the same services in a community setting. (The Campaign is an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.)

What they found surprised them. The 47 program participants initially did not want to use technology for accessing telehealth services. Instead, they wanted help connecting to a broader array of services like buying groceries or connecting with distant family members. The need addressed was community, not just access to health care.

Niemoller explains that this more open-ended version of the program still provided essential education to the 43 students who took part from the University of Wyoming’s Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing.

“If you can teach an older person to use a cell phone, you can teach them how to manage diabetes or heart disease,” Niemoller said. “You come to see that they don’t learn in the same way young children do.”

By providing support in using computers and mobile devices, the nurse educator said, students learn about many different aspects of providing care to older adults in a community setting. The nursing students learned to set up a safe, quarantined area at Laramie’s Eppson Center for Seniors, where the services were provided. They also learned to assess participants’ fine motor skills, hearing, and vision as part of the process. This included practical details the students might not learn from textbooks, such as the fact that some seniors’ fingerprints are too weak to use for identification on a smart phone.

The most important skill the students learned, though, was the ability to build trust with community members.

“These are members of the most trusted profession teaching older adults about something they mistrusted: The Internet,” Niemoller said.

This one-on-one interaction in a community setting helps fight social isolation, she said.

“I have spent my entire career working with older adults, and one of the things I know is that they need a reason to get up in the morning,” Niemoller said. “The pandemic took away a lot of that connectivity for people. They might not eat as well, they might not get out and exercise, they might not see family and friends, and that can make people discouraged and depressed. So even though everyone was wearing masks and couldn’t touch each other, they knew that the people around them were going through something similar, and I think that was just as valuable as what they learned.”

Even seemingly ordinary services can help people overcome a sense of isolation, Niemoller observed. She cited an example of a program participant who was born in France and used Google Maps to revisit the streets of her native village half a world away.

“She could get on Street View and go up and down the streets of her hometown,” she said. “She said, ‘I will never get to go home, but today I got to go home.’”

Learning to create relationships that make that kind of difference, she said, will be essential to provide the kind of care in community settings envisioned by the National Academy of Medicine’s report The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity. For this reason, Niemoller is now looking at how the program could be replicated across the state.

The program connecting seniors and nurses also drew on the support of the AARP Wyoming state office, which had previously established a similar program connecting its members ages 50+ and high school students. In addition to providing matching funds, AARP Wyoming asked the state’s Internet service providers to consider low-cost Internet options for eligible older adults to access more affordable connectivity.

Thomas Lacock, AARP Wyoming’s associate state director for communications and state advocacy, said that connecting seniors with high-speed Internet service has been an increasingly important priority for the organization. But the connection itself is just part of the equation. Older people may also need support to overcome distrust of new technology, he said. That’s an area where nurses can make an essential difference.

“Anytime someone says they are a nurse, it sends a message to folks that they have devoted their entire life to serve,” Lacock said. “That offers instant trust and credibility.”

Get Involved

To learn more about the Wyoming State Action Coalition and this program, please contact Jeanine Neimoller at jeanine.niemoller@outlook.com.

To connect with AARP Wyoming about volunteer opportunities, contact Jennifer Baier, associate state director of community outreach at jbaier@aarp.org.

Interested in other AARP volunteer opportunities? Visit the AARP volunteer portal and be connected with opportunities in your area. An AARP log-in is required and free to non-members.

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The Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), is pleased to announce that 10 projects proposed by its state-based Action Coalitions, or in a few cases, organizations designated by an Action Coalition, have been selected to receive awards up to $25,000 each for new or ongoing work that strengthens nursing’s role in building a Culture of Health and promoting health equity. All 2020  Nursing Innovations Fund secured dollar to dollar matching funds from a variety of partners, including local county fire and emergency services, a state beef council, United Way, local foundations, health and hospital systems, universities and individual donors, to name a few.

The winning projects from nearly every region of the country range from developing nurse leaders to serve on local boards to a mentoring program for Black men that promotes educational attainment and employment opportunities in nursing. All are designed to address policies that impact the many different social, economic and environmental factors that shape our health, and that will lead to greater health equity for all.

RWJF defines health equity as, “everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. This requires removing obstacles to health such as poverty, discrimination, and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs with fair pay, quality education and housing, safe environments and health care.”

“As a co-chair of the Campaign’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee (EDISC),

I am proud that these 2020 Nursing Innovation Fund projects are committed to advancing health equity, particularly at a moment when our nation is finally paying increased attention to addressing systemic racism,” said Carmen Alvarez, PhD, CRNP, FAAN, assistant professor, Department of Community-Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.

“A pathway to equity is to help build better health through nursing,” said Eric J. Williams, DNP,  RN, FAAN, assistant director and faculty chair and professor of nursing at Santa Monica College, and fellow co-chair of the EDISC. “These efforts are a step in that direction and I applaud the Action Coalitions for their work.”

The Campaign’s Nursing Innovations Fund was created in 2018 to support work of its Action Coalitions and allies that inform and influence policy, produce replicable strategies that place nurses in positions as essential partners in providing care, and strategically involve a diversity of stakeholders. This competition was limited to the Action Coalitions or organizations designated by Action Coalitions and required applicants to raise funds to match the award dollars. To date, 23 Action Coalitions and allies have received Nursing Innovation Fund awards to build healthier communities through nursing.

“As our nation continues to face the devastation wrought by COVID-19, nurses remain on the frontlines as trusted providers of care. Now, more than ever, our country is relying on nurses to apply their unique knowledge and understanding of community needs for better health. These states demonstrate how nurses use that critical perspective to implement innovative programs to improve health and well-being,” said Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior adviser for nursing at RWJF and director of the Campaign for Action and 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.

The winners and an overview of their proposals are listed below:

Arkansas and Tennessee

The Arkansas Center for Nursing and the Tennessee Action Coalition aims to develop nurse leadership and places nurses on local housing and planning boards throughout the Arkansas Tennessee Delta region, to help create healthier communities through the project, “Nurses Building a Culture of Health in the Arkansas-Tennessee Delta”. This geographic area has a history of inequities, poverty and poor health outcomes. Matching funds were provided by the Arkansas State Board of Nursing, the Tennessee Department of Health and the Tennessee Housing Development Agency.

Georgia

The Georgia Nursing Leadership Coalition plans to implement a mentoring program for Black men that promotes educational attainment and employment opportunities in nursing through the “High School to Higher Education: Increasing Black Male Representation in Nursing” project. The efforts will engage community partners as stakeholders and employ a holistic approach to providing professional and personal development opportunities to assist mentors and mentees build the skills needed for educational attainment and employment success.

Kentucky

The Kentucky Nurses Action Coalition’s project, “Kentucky Partners to the BARN (Bringing Awareness Right Now) Program for a Farmer Dinner Theater Addressing Mental Health & Wellness” is a three-part intervention program designed to help address farmer mental health issues and prevent suicide. Fifty high school students with an agricultural career interest will receive tailored training sessions to raise self-awareness about mental health and wellness, learn suicide prevention skills and theater skills to produce a dinner theater addressing mental health and wellness for approximately 100 Kentucky farmers and their families.

Nebraska

The Nebraska Action Coalition’s project, “Striving for Health Equity in Nebraska,” works to address social determinants through a multipronged approach.

1. Build professional students’ knowledge of population health by having them design and disseminate health information at school health fairs.
2. Develop community-based partnerships via an advanced practice registered nurse led clinic which provides integrated behavioral health care for rural and underserved populations.
3. Promote awareness and build partnerships through an annual Leadership/Culture of Health conference. The conference will address topics such as advocacy, policy, mental health/self-care, implicit bias, and it will also include a “COVID-19 Lessons Learned” panel.

North Carolina

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s project, “On the Ground: Access to Care through Building Faith, Health, and Community Partnerships,” supported by the North Carolina Action Coalition, seeks to develop a faith, health, and community engagement model utilizing the Campaign’s Health Equity Toolkit. The program aims to enhance the health equity advocacy and partnership/coalition building skills of nurses, nursing students, pastors and church members to promote the health and well-being of communities through congregations. It will also create a regional steering committee to engage stakeholders to prioritize and address social determinants of health that adversely affect the health and well-being of African American and rural communities, and promote health-related congregational activities focused on the needs of the community.

Pennsylvania

Through its “At the Core of Care” podcast, the Pennsylvania Action Coalition will showcase stories of nurses and their partners driving change by addressing social determinants of health. The series will be incorporated into nursing school classrooms to inspire public health leadership and advocacy.

Washington

The National Alliance for Filipino Concerns launched the “Bayanihan Response to COVID-19″ to respond to the immediate and long-term health and wellness needs of Filipino communities in the United States and the Philippines. Via a telephone weekly check in and screening with elders identified as high need, callers assess for COVID-19 symptoms, food, prescription, utilities, housing needs and pre-paid phone minutes. They also offer a grocery and meal delivery program to ensure clients have access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food.  Lastly, they will conduct a community wellness survey. Focus group results will be disseminated to community members, stakeholders, and the public. In collaboration with Seattle University College of Nursing, and support of the Washington Action Coalition, they will use survey data to create interventions and initiatives to address community needs.

West Virginia

The West Virginia Action Coalition project, “RN Entrepreneur Project Continuation,” will create five sustainable nurse businesses and teach the entrepreneur course to 20 additional nurses. The training curriculum and program will expand across the state.

Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Action Coalition’s project, “Preparing Wisconsin Nurses to Address the Needs of Vulnerable Populations in a Public Health Emergency”, will design and develop trainings for Wisconsin nurses in response to the specific educational needs created by COVID-19. Trainings will address disparities impacting Wisconsin’s most vulnerable populations. Components include: launching educational programs for Milwaukee nurses who care for diverse and vulnerable populations, evaluating and improving learning content and methodologies and expanding the program statewide.

Wyoming

The aim of the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities, University of Wyoming, in support with the Wyoming Action Coalition project, “Facilitating Seniors’ Use of Technology to Decrease Social Isolation,” is for nursing students to help older adults use technology in their homes to access health care, purchase groceries and household goods, and communicate with their friends and family.

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The objective were:

• Develop partnerships between nursing programs and academic support/college readiness services to support potential and current nursing students
• Support career education and readiness in Wyoming middle and high schools
• Develop a repository of best practices to enhance diversity in Wyoming
• Monitor the diversity of nursing students and nurses in Wyoming

The post Wyoming Creates Diversity Toolkit to Strengthen Pipeline into Nursing appeared first on Campaign for Action.

Additionally, the Action Coalition created an online toolkit called the “Renew Concept-Based Clinical Activity Clinical Toolkit” which is meant to be used by state faculty members to implement concept-based learning.

ReNEW website

Toolkit

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– Role of the Preceptor

– The First Day

– Learning Styles

– Feedback

– The Last Day

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“Nursing Journeys” is a profile series featuring Action Coalition leaders discussing their career paths and reflecting on the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

Mary Burman, PhD, FAANP, FAAN, is dean and professor at the University of Wyoming’s Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing. She is also co-lead of the Wyoming Action Coalition and has been the project director for two State Implementation Program (SIP) grants, both focused on streamlining nursing education programs for Wyoming students.

Why did you decide to become a nurse?
To be honest, I really wanted to be a rancher. But in my senior year of high school, after realizing that purchasing a ranch was way out of reach, I took a health occupations course which required students to spend time working at the local hospital in a nursing aide capacity. I found that I really enjoyed the caregiving and science underlying health and nursing, including anatomy, physiology, and pharmacology. That’s when I made the decision to become a nurse.

Can you describe the journey you went on to get from that decision to where you are today?
I will always be a student at heart! I began as a staff nurse but quickly returned to school for graduate education at the University of Michigan to satisfy my bottomless curiosity about so many topics related to nursing and health care. While there, I earned a master’s in community health nursing and a PhD in nursing science. That started me on my path to becoming an educator and since then, I have gone from being an assistant professor to professor.  In addition, I have held a number of administrative positions in higher education.

What impact did the Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report have on you?
The Future of Nursing report has guided the work of the Wyoming Center for Nursing, which houses our state’s Action Coalition. I serve on the center’s advisory board and have been involved in several of our major initiatives, such as ReNEW, our statewide initiative to support academic progression, and nursing leadership development, such as our Nurses on Boards activities.

The center launched in 2009 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a variety of Wyoming funding partners. It is committed to creating a Culture of Health that promotes the development of a diverse health care workforce by transforming nursing education, advancing the health of individuals, and improving communities through collaborative partnerships. With a broad-based statewide membership, the center has several priority areas which are inspired by the IOM report: academic progression; leadership development, including facilitating nurses serving on boards; and diversity in nursing education and practice. In addition, the center recently began an in-depth look at the nursing workforce in long-term care in Wyoming.

How have you been involved with the Campaign for Action?
I currently serve as the co-lead of the Wyoming Action Coalition, a role I have held since 2011. Among our state’s many accomplishments, we have developed and implemented a statewide Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree curriculum and a mentoring program for nurses who want to serve on boards.

Of all you have accomplished, what are you most proud of?
I was one of the co-founders of the Downtown Clinic, a free clinic in Laramie, Wyoming.  The clinic provides truly comprehensive care to those in our community without insurance coverage, including primary care, nursing services, specialty care, physical therapy, and so on. The clinic has many diverse community partners and it is a remarkable example of collaboration and innovation, all done on a shoe string budget.

What is the most important action that nurses can take to lead the way to improve health and health care in America?
The ways that nurses can address our country’s pressing health care challenges are endless. What stands out to me, given my long involvement in nursing education, is that academic nursing is poised to become a full partner in health care alongside our nursing colleagues in practice. Through that academic-practice collaboration, nursing can address health care challenges in new ways and with better outcomes for the communities we serve.

What advice do you have for the next generation?
In order to effect change in health care, nursing, and nursing education, nurses have to be engaged in the policy arena at the local, state, and federal levels.  This can be some of the most satisfying work (especially when long, hard efforts pay off in legislative and regulatory changes), and some of the most challenging work, especially right now when we are so polarized as a country. I strongly encourage the next generation of nurses to be very engaged in policy.

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• Distribution of population by race/ethnicity
• Percentage of population living in rural versus urban areas
• Distribution of population by federal poverty level
• Areas in which there is a shortage of primary health professionals

These statistics can guide your Action Coalition’s work in shaping a nursing workforce to better meet local needs and overcoming health disparities in your state. As you integrate other Culture of Health aspects into your work, consider how demographics play a role in health equity and fostering cross-sector collaboration.

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Many registered nurses (RNs) start—and finish—their post-secondary education with an associate degree in nursing (ADN). But health care experts want more nurses to see the ADN as a first step on a career-long educational journey.

“Our goal is to improve health and health care for all Americans,” said Susan B. Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, senior adviser for nursing at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). “One key way to do that is to build a more highly educated nursing workforce.”

That is what RWJF and AARP are doing through the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a nationwide effort to ensure that nurses are essential partners in providing care and promoting health. It is rooted in a 2010 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which recommended that 80 percent of nurses hold bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) degrees or higher by the year 2020, and that the country double the number of nurses holding doctorates.

The IOM report recognized that ADN-prepared nurses are essential to the delivery of health care and that the community colleges that offer ADN programs play a critical role in preparing and diversifying the nursing workforce. But more highly educated nurses are needed to provide more highly skilled care to an aging and more complex patient population, it said. Additionally, more nurses are needed to fill faculty positions and advanced practice roles such as nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and nurse anesthetists. Having a large enough pool of nurses to draw from for these faculty and advanced practice roles will require that more nurses have a BSN from the onset.

BSN-prepared nurses, in fact, are associated with improved patient outcomes, according to Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, FAAN, director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. In a study published this past February in the Lancet, Aiken found that hospitals that employ larger numbers of BSN-prepared nurses have lower patient mortality rates.

The Campaign for Action offers strategies to make it easier for nurses to get BSN degrees or higher, including RN-to-BSN degree programs offered at community colleges; state or regionally shared curricula among universities and community colleges; accelerated RN-to-MSN programs; and partnerships that enable students to transition seamlessly from an ADN to a BSN program.

Success Stories

Successes are popping up all over the country. The University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing, for example, has partnered with Academic Partnerships, a global higher-education service provider, to offer an innovative online RN-to-BSN program. Under the program, students are admitted eight times a year, courses are delivered online in five-week blocks, and academic coaches support the course instructor and help keep students on time and on target.

The program has exceeded expectations, said Beth Mancini, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor and associate dean of undergraduate nursing at the University of Texas at Arlington and a member of the Texas Action Coalition. Enrollment in the RN-to-BSN program has grown exponentially—from fewer than 150 students in 2008 to about 8,000 this spring. The graduation rate is approximately 90 percent, and the student body is more diverse because of the accessible and affordable nature of the program, Mancini said.

In addition, Academic Partnerships has provided the Texas Action Coalition with funds for scholarships to be awarded to minority students entering BSN-completion programs. These scholarships, along with individuals who volunteer as mentors, are part of the Texas Action Coalition’s plan to increase minority participation in BSN-completion programs.

“We knew that there were many nurses in Texas and throughout the country who needed accessible and affordable programs to complete their BSNs and hopefully go on to MSNs or doctorates,” Mancini said. “They couldn’t do it the way most programs were designed, so we developed a program that would work for them.”

In Wyoming, meanwhile, nurse leaders are implementing a common, competency-based, statewide curriculum that enables nursing students to start at a state community college or at the University of Wyoming and continue, seamlessly, toward a BSN or higher. The initiative, called ReNEW—an acronym for Revolutionizing Nursing Education in Wyoming—is supported by an RWJF State Implementation Program grant.

And in New York, nurse educators at the City University of New York (CUNY) launched an initiative in 2008 to enable students to progress seamlessly from ADN to BSN programs within the CUNY system. Currently, there are two programs up and running, and the first students are graduating this spring from Hunter College.

The academic journey has been “much smoother for the students” because of the initiative, said Maureen Wallace, EdD, RN, a faculty fellow with the Office of the University Dean for Health and Human Services at CUNY. The initiative has also led to the inauguration of a new online RN-to-BSN program and the creation of a faculty council that is exploring standardized admissions policies and curricula across all ADN programs in the CUNY system, Wallace said.

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