Nursing faculty Jayne Josephsen and Ann Butt were accepted into the Health Information Technologies Scholars (HITS) Program in January 2012. This program is funded through the Human Resources and Services Administration Bureau of Health Professions in partnership with the Office of Health Information Technology and coordinated by the University of Kansas. The HITS program is designed to support faculty development towards integration of information technologies in nursing curriculum. Participants were selected based upon the faculty applicant’s evidence of interest in information technology, ability to provide leadership for curriculum change, quality of proposed project, and level of support from the school of nursing, as it is a yearlong program.
The pilot project developed for the HITS program is a multi-faceted one, geared towards delegation and prioritization skills necessary for successful transition to nursing practice. The pilot project has been implemented in the Nursing 427 preceptorship course, which is the final clinical course prior to graduation. Initially, a set of electronic health records were developed and students were asked to review and evaluate these records for pertinent information and plan of care development. Secondly, a multi-patient simulation was developed based upon the Quality and Safety Education Standards for Nurses. The students were presented with the simulation, which was followed by group debriefing and reflection. The project currently is moving into it’s evaluation phase and results will be disseminated either by manuscript or presentation.
Additionally, Jayne Josephsen has been accepted into the Gerontological Nursing Faculty Scholars Program (GNFSP) at the Oregon Health Sciences University School of Nursing. The program was created to enhance gerontological content in undergraduate course teaching and is funded through the Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence. Participants were selected based upon their educational philosophy, research interests, and project applicability. The project to be developed is the design of a distance education course based on nursing roles and healthy aging. This course is to be implemented in spring 2013 in the self-support RN-BS Online/Distance Completion Track and ultimately will be adapted to live class implementation in the Boise State University School of Nursing undergraduate curriculum.