Innovative Learning

Providing quality healthcare while maintaining or decreasing costs will depend on how technology is integrated in the fabric of the care given without losing the care and compassion needed for individualized care. This requires changes in educating nurses to embrace innovations in teaching and learning.

Therefore, I am proud to introduce the new Helene Fuld Pavilion for Innovative Learning, a unique educational center where technology meets the science of caring.

On the strategically renovated first floor of Fagin Hall, the Fuld Pavilion expands Penn Nursing’s simulation space to 7,000 square feet, equipped to best prepare students for evidence-based practices they will use as novice and expert nurses. The Fuld Pavilion features:

• Simulation rooms that are designed to reflect different care settings, including outpatient, hospital, and home care

• Interactive mannequins, diverse in age, gender, and race, and the capability for behavioral, live action, and high fidelity simulations

• Rooms outfitted with video systems to record students’ simulation experiences, maximizing opportunities for educational debriefing, evaluation, and reflection with faculty and fellow students

• The renovations include upgrades to the Brunner and general skills labs where students learn and practice nursing techniques in blood draws and patient monitoring.

These state-of-the-art learning tools integrate theory, research, and practice to build essential competencies in our nursing students. Simulations offer challenging but safe opportunities to review and assess the effectiveness of our students’ developing competencies, diagnostic abilities, and organizational and decision-making choices.

As the only undergraduate BSN program in the Ivy League, Penn Nursing leads the way as a model in nursing education. The high-tech, high-touch Fuld Pavilion shapes our students’ experience with the knowledge, the tools, and the best practices to influence care and policy around the world.

ACT for Sandy Hook

“What can I do to help?” I understand and share the heartfelt desire to do something to heal our grieving society in the wake of the massacre of children and educators in Sandy Hook, and to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. 

But, the unfortunate truth we know as nurses is that tragedy happens every day. It happens, as President Obama said, “in small towns and big cities all across America.”

What can nurses do to help? ACT. Advocacy, Clinical Judgment, and Transformation.

Advocacy: Our professional organizations must uniformly advocate for

·         full-time school nurses, who are often the first to identify and work with troubled students

·         fixing a mental health system that is uneven, complex, and ineffectively isolated from other areas of healthcare

·         more federal funding devoted to research on mental health, violence prevention, and healthcare disparities.

Clinical Judgment: From wars abroad to violence on our on soil, nurses so very often are the first to recognize and respond to crises, to diagnose pain, to alleviate suffering, provide comfort to those who are grieving, and to decrease other risks. And, as nurses deliver more primary care, we will be in key positions to identify those who need mental healthcare and to help patients navigate the health system to get the care they need. Therefore, use your clinical judgment to join the national and global debates and dialogues about guns that cause violence, pain, suffering, and death.

Transformation: Our education and experiences give us insights that are important to share as our country considers real change. The Affordable Care Act places nurses front and center in the U.S. healthcare system. We can own our power and lead the charge for policy changes that will create a more stable, more healthful, more peaceful society.  We must amplify our voices in the national conversation on the factors that lead to violence and how to prevent it.

I close with the words of President Obama: “If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown -- and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that -- then surely we have an obligation to try.”

ACT. Let that be our resolve in 2013. 

For those who need immediate assistance with trauma, go to the following website www.apna.org/TraumaticEvents for help.