Two nursing faculty members at Southern were honored recently by the Connecticut Nursing Collaborative Action Coalition (CNC-AC) for their effort to eliminate the gap between academia and real world practice.
Lisa Rebeschi, chairwoman of the SCSU Nursing Department, and Barbara Aronson, coordinator of SCSU’s nursing doctoral program, were presented awards at the CNC-AC’s Education Summit held at the Yale School of Nursing.
A recent initiative, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, seeks to minimize the divide and better prepare students to be nurses. Nurses and nursing faculty at SCSU, Gateway Community College and Yale-New Haven Hospital worked collaboratively on the project.
The project enabled faculty to analyze their curricula, as well as real world patient care, leadership, technology, communication and teamwork, safety, quality improvement and evidence-based practice. The goal is to better prepare nursing students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to provide high quality and effective care.
The analysis also assists in identifying the educational needs of associate degree nursing students who begin baccalaureate nursing degree programs.
More than 175 recommendations were made and an action plan developed to implement many of these strategies during the next several years.
Sandra Bulmer, interim dean of the SCSU School of Health and Human Services, said Rebeschi and Aronson have made substantial contributions that will have benefit the future of nursing education in Connecticut.
“Their wealth of experience as nurse educators in public institutions added important perspectives to the work of the CNC-AC,” Bulmer said.
“Their leadership positions at our institution uniquely position them to take immediate action to begin implementation of curricular changes that will benefit our students and improve the quality of patient care in our healthcare settings.”
