Vital Signs - Fall 2018

The University of Illinois at Chicago 845 S Damen Ave, MC 802 Chicago, IL 60612

In their camp

Laurie Quinn works on a diabetes breakthrough

Inspirational Alumni

Meet our alumni award winners

Care for the incarcerated Grant brings health education to jail

FALL 2018

The Diverse Paths of Nursing Visit our new website! • nursing.uic.edu

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 3

Join the UIC College of Nursing as we blaze a trail toward our most ambitious fundraising goal in history, all to support students, increase resources for faculty and improve facilities.

Small and large gifts to any of these funds move us closer to our $33 million goal.

UIC COLLEGE OF NURSING SCHOLARSHIP FUND UIC COLLEGE OF NURSING REGIONAL SCHOLARSHIP FUND UIC COLLEGE OF NURSING ANNUAL FUND UIC COLLEGE OF NURSING SIMULATION LABORATORY

Give today at go.uic.edu/IgniteUICNursing.

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College of Nursing

Volume 33

FALL 2018

DEPARTMENTS

FEATURES

2 Message from the Dean 3 Notepad

College of Nursing news

Expert Viewpoint: Opioid Crisis (page 21)

10 Snapshots of Rwanda Professor Holli DeVon fulfills a longtime dream by spending a semester in Rwanda as a Fulbright scholar.

18 Hope Floats Journey with Nathan Claus as he sails the coast of Africa on the world’s biggest hospital ship.

14 Inspirational Alumni Meet our Distinguished Alumni Award Winner and Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award Winners.

22 In Their Camp Professor Laurie Quinn’s decades-long volunteer work at a diabetes camp grounds her diabetes research.

UIC faculty, staff and alumni donate equipment to Rwandan students (page 12)

21 Expert Viewpoint

Palliative care expert Ardith Doorenbos talks about opioids in America 25 Student Spotlight

Student Nurses for Social Justice 26 I Impact

Donor and student stories 29 Research Round-up Highlights from UIC nurse scientists 32 Focus on Education

Teaching correctional healthcare 34 Around the State

Updates from UIC Nursing Campuses in Peoria, Quad Cities, Rockford, Springfield and Urbana 40 NurseFirst

Lorna Finnegan recalls a favorite memory from her early career

DEAN Terri E. Weaver, PhD, RN, FAAN, ATSF CHIEF EDITOR Liz Miller

UIC COLLEGE OF NURSING OFFICE OF ADVANCEMENT Steven A. George, Assistant Dean Liz Miller, Director, Marketing and Public Affairs

On the cover: Nathan Claus, BSN ’08 stands on the dock beside the Africa Mercy, where he serves in a volunteer role with Mercy Ships as the hospital director.

MANAGING EDITOR & WRITER Deborah Ziff Soriano

Sara Almassian, Associate Director, Alumni Engagement and Participation

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Liz Miller, Jacqueline Carey

Gina Mancari, Advancement Coordinator

©Mercy Ships, credit: Saul Loubassa.

PHOTOGRAPHER Mark Mershon

GRAPHIC DESIGNER Joanne Chappell

Matthew Campion, Associate Director, Development Joanne Chappell, Graphic Designer Mark Mershon, Multimedia Associate Deborah Ziff Soriano, Editorial Writer

Vital Signs is published for the alumni, faculty, students and friends of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing. © 2018 Your comments are welcomed: University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing (MC 802) 845 S. Damen Ave. Chicago, IL 60612 Phone: 312-996-7800 Email: lhmiller@uic.edu Web: nursing.uic.edu Facebook: UIC.CON Twitter: @uicnursing Instagram: uicnursing

DEAN’S MESSAGE

In February, I found myself 9,000 feet above sea level, in the Rwandan jungle, embedded with a band of gorillas. I was with Professor Holli DeVon, who was spending the semester in Rwanda as a prestigious Fulbright scholar. As I took in the experience, I thought about all the places my career has taken me: six continents and countless academic and practice settings. Nursing truly can take you anywhere. That’s the theme of this issue of Vital Signs. Our alumni, armed with their UIC nursing degrees, can and do pursue meaningful and diverse paths.

In this issue, you’ll read about alumnus Nathan Claus (featured on the cover), who has spent nearly six years as a volunteer on the Africa Mercy, the world’s largest private hospital ship, helping some of the poorest of the world’s citizens get much-needed surgery.

You’ll read about Paul Kuehnert, our Distinguished Alumni Award winner, who has dedicated his career to community healthcare and now helps lead the nation’s biggest health philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You’ll also learn about our three Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award winners, each of whom carved out her own unique path: one as an entrepreneur, one as a top administrator and one as a pioneer.

In our “Around the State” section, you’ll read interviews with inspiring alumni from our five campuses outside of Chicago who are working to improve healthcare delivery across the state of Illinois and beyond.

We’re also proud to showcase the paths of our nurse researchers: Laurie Quinn, who is working to develop the first closed-loop artificial pancreas, and DeVon, who is researching ways to improve health outcomes for Rwandans.

No matter what path our students-turned-alumni choose, many think back on their time with us as important in their lives. For instance, Jane Sherman spent much of her life and career on the East Coast, but pledged a major gift to UIC Nursing because she remembers our college as a place of tremendous support.

We asked our alumni what they wanted to see in Vital Signs. The response was resounding: More stories about alumni. We did not have to look far to find stories of inspirational alumni. Our nurses are leaders. They’re teachers.

They’re listeners, healers, interpreters, community-builders and scientists.

And everywhere, they’re using what they learned at UIC Nursing to turn science into solutions in the real world.

Terri E. Weaver, PhD, RN, FAAN, ATSF Professor and Dean

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NOTEPAD

Five faculty selected for AAN fellowship

Five UIC College of Nursing faculty were selected by the American Academy of Nursing (AAN) to join its class of 2018 fellows. Fellowship in the AAN is considered the highest honor in the nursing profession.

Susan Corbridge, PhD ’09, APRN, FAANP

Associate dean for practice and community partnerships In her role, Corbridge is responsible for the development and maintenance of faculty practice, including the College of Nursing’s nurse-managed clinic. She maintains a clinical practice at UI Health, has received numerous teaching awards and is currently overseeing a grant to expand the college’s education and practice initiatives with the Cook County Department of Corrections (see page 32).

Valerie Gruss, PhD, APN, CNP-BC

Clinical associate professor Gruss’ position blends her role as researcher, clinician and educator. She is principal investigator of a roughly $3 million Health Resources and Service Administration-funded grant, ENGAGE-IL, an education and practice initiative to enhance the care of older adults, made up of interprofessional UIC leaders.

Mary Kapella, PhD, MS, RN

Associate professor and interim director of the Center for Sleep and Health Research Kapella’s research focuses on fatigue and insomnia in people with chronic illness. Kapella is currently leading the college’s Center for Narcolepsy, Sleep and Health Research, an important source of sleep science and health expertise for the more than 50 million Americans who suffer from sleep problems.

Carrie Klima, PhD, MS ’86, CNM, FACNM

Clinical professor and director of the nursemidwifery program Klima is a faculty member and program director of the nurse-midwifery program. She is involved in Centering Pregnancy, a group model of prenatal care that combines assessment, education and support for pregnant women. Klima’s current research focuses on group care for pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Judith Schlaeger, PhD, MS ’88, BSN ’80, CNM, LAC

Assistant professor Schlaeger is a practicing certified nurse midwife, licensed acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist. She is a pain researcher, interested in developing new assessments and treatments for chronic pain by integrating conventional medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. She was recently awarded a five-year, $2 million NIH grant to study the effect of acupuncture on vulvar pain and painful intercourse in women with vulvodynia.

From left: Valerie Gruss, Carrie Klima, Susan Corbridge, Mary Kapella and Judith Schlaeger

ROSENBERGER CHOSEN AS FAANP Kelly D. Rosenberger, DNP ’12, CNM, WHNP-BC, clinical assistant professor and director of the Rockford campus, was selected as one of 64 nurse practitioner leaders for induction as a fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners in 2018.

At the Rockford campus, Rosenberger has led the development of a new rural health program, called “RNURSING,” an innovative education model designed to narrow the gap of health disparities, promote the health of patients and communities, and increase the number of nurse practitioners in underserved rural areas.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 3

CREDIT: DAVID BRACHO

NOTEPAD

Nursing students spend spring break volunteering in Puerto Rico In fall 2017, a group of UIC College of Nursing students were talking about spending spring break on a mission trip. When catastrophic Hurricane Maria made its deadly landfall in the Caribbean, it focused their sights on Puerto Rico.

“We said, ‘Why not help out those who need so much assistance right now?’” said Celine Dalde, BSN ’18, then-president of the Student Nurses’ Association.

Seven months later—after independently planning and raising money for the trip—Dalde and 10 other undergraduate nursing students were in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico.

The students spent their spring break working with two doctors at One Human Family Coalition, a free clinic in the northwest part of the country that opened in October to respond to a groundswell of need from hurricane victims.

During the week-long trip, the nursing students helped provide free healthcare for members of the community,

UIC NURSING STRONG IN U.S. NEWS RANKINGS UIC’s doctor of nursing practice program climbed three spots to a ranking of No. 12 in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools of 2019, making it the top program among public Midwestern universities in the publication’s annual rankings.

UIC Nursing’s master of science program also improved, rising to the No. 18 spot from No. 20 in last year’s rankings.

“These rankings factor into the decision-making of many students trying to identify the best nursing programs,” said Catherine Vincent, PhD, RN, the College of Nursing’s associate dean for academic affairs.

The rankings included 296 nursing master’s programs and 203 Doctor of Nursing Practice programs and were based on a weighted average of 14 indicators, including research activity, program selectivity, faculty resources and credentials and the ratings of academic peers.

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Dalde, front left, and fellow UIC Nursing students organized a spring break trip to volunteer at a clinic in Puerto Rico.

accompanied the doctors on home visits to remote locations and distributed free food, water and solar lamps.

Dalde said distributing supplies was a key part of their work because power and water have been slow to return to that part of the country. The National Guard distributes water outside of the clinic, where the students stayed in cots.

Dalde said for her, one of the most valuable parts of the trip was visiting patients at home, some of whom live in the mountains and don’t have transportation to the clinic.

“A lot of people had lost hope because they hadn’t received help in all this time since the hurricane,” she said. “Just to be there for them and see the relief on their faces, knowing there were people to help them, was really rewarding.”

This was the second year in a row that UIC Nursing students organized themselves to carry out a mission trip. In January 2017, they went to Cusco, Peru.

Among nurse specialties, the UIC College of Nursing was ranked:

4

No.

for Nursing Administration

12

No.

for Nurse Practitioner: Psychiatric/ Mental Health

12

No.

for Nurse Practitioner: Family

13

No.

for Nurse Practitioner: Adult/Gerontology, Acute Care

The college’s DNP program in midwifery is also ranked No. 10 in the nation based on last year’s list. U.S. News & World Report did not review and re-rank midwifery programs for 2019.

NOTEPAD

Students step up to donate class gift As a first-ever fundraiser for a College of Nursing class gift, students ran, walked and climbed to the top of the College of Nursing building on the Chicago campus.

The gift from “Hustle Up Nursing,” as the event was dubbed, is going toward the renovation of the college’s simulation lab, which is due to open in 2019.

Dean Terri Weaver, who cheered the students on, said it wasn’t the size of the gift that mattered, but the gesture of school support.

“For those of us who are graduating, it’s our way of showing how much we appreciate our time here and paying it forward to the next classes of students,” said Celine Dalde, then-president of the Student Nurses’ Association.

“HUSTLE UP NURSING” BY THE NUMBERS:

CREDIT: ADAM BIBA, UIC CREATIVE & DIGITAL SERVICES

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STORIES

187

STEPS

40

STUDENTS

$387

RAISED

2

AVERAGE NUMBER OF MINUTES TO COMPLETE

UIC NURSING IS TOPS ON GIVING TUESDAY The generosity of the UIC College of Nursing community was on full display on Giving Tuesday 2017, an annual day of giving after Thanksgiving.

The college closed the day ahead of all other UIC units in terms of both dollars raised and number of donors.

There were 171 donors from the UIC Nursing community—including 100 students—who contributed $26,643 in person and online.

Donations supported UIC Nursing’s goals within IGNITE: The Campaign for UIC (see page 28).

Join the fun of UIC Nursing’s next Giving Tuesday campaign: Nov. 27, 2018.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 5

NOTEPAD

SIXTEEN “40 UNDER 40” HONOREES AFFILIATED WITH UIC NURSING The UIC College of Nursing counts 16 alumni, faculty members and students among the Illinois Nurses Foundation’s 2018 list of “40 Under 40 Emerging Nurse Leaders.”

Winners were chosen by a panel of their peers based on their achievements in the profession, leadership, and community and association involvement.

Since the “40 Under 40” program’s inception four years ago, UIC College of Nursing affiliates (alumni, faculty and students) account for 27.5 percent of the honorees.

Complete list of UIC Nursingaffiliated honorees in 2018: • Stacy Arriola, MS ’16 • Trevor Barnum, current DNP student • Timothy Carrigan, PhD ’11 • Hillary Crumlett, MS ’13 • Jodi Cunningham, current DNP student • Heide Cygan, DNP ’13 • Katherine De Los Trinos-Ocampo, BSN ’04 • Lindsey Garfield, BSN ’03, MS ’09, PhD ’12 • Melissa Kalensky, MS ’11 • Carol Kindleberger, MS ’16 • Gwyneth Milbrath, clinical assistant professor • Maritza Moreno, BSN ’09 • Virginia Reising, current DNP student and visiting teaching associate • Abigail Sofian, MS ’14 • Christian Villanueva, current DNP student • Lisa Walla, BSN ’01

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Ferrans, Zenk get top honors at investiture ceremony Carol Estwing Ferrans, PhD ’85, MS ’82, RN, FAAN, and Shannon Zenk, PhD, MS ’99, MPH, RN, FAAN, formally took their places in two prestigious roles within the College of Nursing at an investiture ceremony on Thursday, April 5.

Ferrans was invested as the Harriet H. Werley Endowed Chair in Nursing Research, the college’s only endowed chair. Zenk was invested as Nursing Collegiate Professor, one of the college’s highest honors, which is supported in part by gifts to the College of Nursing Annual Fund.

Calling them “two of the most energetic and persistent nurse researchers I have ever known,” Dean Terri Weaver applauded the contributions of the two faculty members.

“Dr. Zenk and Dr. Ferrans, whose work is notable for the impact on communities, are living up to the promise of health research in truly extraordinary fashion,” she said. “I congratulate them on their lasting contributions to humanity and their places in the history of the UIC College of Nursing.”

The act of investiture, a revered academic tradition, was performed

by UIC vice chancellor for health affairs, Robert Barish, MD. Both faculty elicited standing ovations from about 80 colleagues, friends and family in the college’s Third Floor Event Center.

Ferrans becomes third Werley Chair

Ferrans has made an “indelible footprint on the UIC College of Nursing, Illinois and the world,” said Mariann Piano, PhD ’88, MS ’84, RN, FAAN, FAHA, Nancy & Hilliard Travis Professor of Nursing at Vanderbilt University, in her tribute address to Ferrans at the investiture.

Ferrans’ research on Illinois’ disparity in breast cancer deaths between African Americans and Caucasian women—at one time the worst in the nation—led to legislation and new guidelines for breast cancer screening. There has since been a 35 percent reduction in that disparity.

Zenk, a most prolific researcher

In a tribute to Zenk, Richard Campbell, professor emeritus of the UIC School of Public Health and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, lauded Zenk’s “focus and drive” as she’s forged a research path on food deserts.

Her research has shown that people who live in low-income and segregated neighborhoods lack access to healthy foods and suffer from lower dietary quality and higher weights. She has since expanded her research to study pharmacy deserts, activity spaces and veterans.

NOTEPAD

INDIA THROUGH A STUDENT’S LENS Ericka Garduno, a graduate-entry master of science student, was the winner of the 2018 Global Health Photo Competition, which is sponsored by the college’s Global Health Leadership Office. Her photo features a young girl standing outside her home in Maharashta, India, watching preparations for a 10-day Hindu festival in India. Garduno was in India as part of a course that allowed her to conduct clinical observations at Bel-Air Hospital, which serves patients with HIV and/or tuberculosis.

SPRINGFIELD GRADUATES FIRST CLASS The first students graduated from UIC College of Nursing’s newest campus in Springfield in academic year 2017-18, a class that included 12 bachelor of science in nursing graduates, two doctor of nursing practice graduates and one master’s graduate.

A UIC Nursing-themed cake at the Springfield pinning ceremony.

Springfield is the sixth UIC nursing campus in Illinois, expanding the college’s reach across the state and joining Chicago, Urbana, Rockford, the Quad Cities and Peoria. The first cohort of students started in fall 2016, thanks to a partnership with the University of Illinois at Springfield and Memorial Health Systems.

UIC Nursing-Springfield’s graduating BSN students at their pinning ceremony.

Across all UIC College of Nursing campuses, there were 436 graduates in 2017-18, which included 159 BSN graduates and 60 DNP graduates, in addition to master’s, PhD and certificate students.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 7

NOTEPAD

World-renowned scientist joins UIC Nursing

says Dean Terri Weaver. “It is a source of great pride that our college was one of the first to garner significant matching funds from the President’s Distinguished Faculty Hiring Program.”

As part of a University of Illinois System initiative to recruit world-class faculty, the UIC College of Nursing has hired Ardith Z. Doorenbos, PhD, RN, FAAN, to join the Department of Biobehavioral Health Science as a Nursing Collegiate Professor. She will also serve as the director of palliative care in the University of Illinois Cancer Center.

Doorenbos was most recently a professor at the University of Washington and is internationallyrecognized for her research on pain, palliative care and symptom management.

She is one of the first seven professors to be hired under a three-year, $60 million systemwide initiative, the President’s Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program, which is intended to woo faculty of national

Doorenbos’ recent work focuses on testing integrative therapies for military service members as well as adolescents with chronic pain who are at risk for opioid abuse. [See Expert Viewpoint, page 21].

and international distinction in a broad range of disciplines.

“I am elated that we have been able to recruit such a talented individual who will greatly contribute to our research enterprise as well as the activities of the Cancer Center,”

Not only a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, she was inducted this year in the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame. She has received more than $37 million in research funding from sources such as the National Institute of Nursing Research and the National Cancer Institute and has current funding of more than $11 million.

TWO PHD STUDENTS CHOSEN AS JONAS SCHOLARS

Susan Hovers

Two PhD students from the UIC College of Nursing were each chosen to receive a $10,000 scholarship from Jonas Philanthropies, with matching funds from the College of Nursing. The Jonas Philanthropies is a leading national philanthropy for graduate nursing education.

Susan Hovers and Sara Mithani, both focused on chronic health issues, are part of the 2018-2020 Jonas Scholar cohort, which includes only 200 scholars pursuing PhD, DNP or EdD degrees at 92 universities across the country.

Sara Mithani

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Mithani in the Laboratory for Sleep Neurobiology at UIC Nursing. She is also a Graduate Partnerships Program fellow at the National Institutes of Health.

NOTEPAD

Kathleen Sparbel, center, with two of her colleagues in Bahrain.

Collaboration in Bahrain

UIC College of Nursing faculty are collaborating with the University of Bahrain College of Health Sciences to develop the first advanced practice nursing master’s degree program in the small Persian Gulf country.

“People have to leave the region and go to the U.K. or to the U.S. to study if they want a master’s degree,” says Linda McCreary, PhD ’00, MS ’93, BSN ’73, RN, FAAN, UIC College of Nursing associate dean for global health. “Having this master’s program in Bahrain will have an impact on the development of the nursing profession across the Gulf region.”

Dr. Aamal Joseph Akleh, dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Bahrain, says advanced practice nurses are the “cornerstone in maintaining patient safety, improving patient care, improving the quality of healthcare services and maximizing patient satisfaction.”

COLLEGE LEADERS SHINE • Terri Weaver, PhD, RN, FAAN, ATSF, dean of the UIC College of Nursing, and Eileen Collins, PhD, RN, FAACVPR, FAAN, ATSF, associate dean for research, were both inducted into the first class of fellows of the American Thoracic Society.

They were two of only nine nurses included in the inaugural group of 182 new fellows, a recognition given to members of the American Thoracic Society for their contributions to the society as well as to the fields of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine.

In addition, Collins received a Presidential Commendation Award for outstanding service to the organization at the awards ceremony, held at the ATS International Conference in San Diego in May.

When the new program gets underway, UIC has agreed to provide faculty for short durations, likely for one- to two-week periods, to teach selected sections of courses in the new program. There will be three master’s level specialties: Adult Health Nursing, Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing and Nurse Midwifery.

Kathleen Sparbel, PhD, MS ’96, FNP-BC, clinical associate professor and director of the UIC Nursing-Quad Cities Campus, reviewed curricular materials and made recommendations during a trip to Bahrain in June.

“Our University of Bahrain nursing colleagues are dedicated to delivering a high-quality master’s nursing education program that provides the established clinical nursing and professional role development competencies essential to support advanced practice nursing,” she said. “UIC’s educational collaboration with the University of Bahrain in this exciting initiative will lead the Gulf region to provide important educational opportunities for nurses and improve clinical outcomes for patients and families.”

The collaboration is the latest in a long-standing relationship. The UIC College of Nursing helped the Ministry of Health in Bahrain establish the College of Health Sciences and its nursing department in 1984, and in 2008, conducted a curriculum review and made recommendations for development of other programs.

Dean Terri Weaver (right) at the May 11 awards ceremony with Penn Nursing Dean Antonia Villarruel

• Weaver was also chosen as the 2018 recipient of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing Outstanding Alumni Award, which recognizes a graduate with an outstanding career that has advanced the profession of nursing.

Weaver is a two-time graduate of Penn’s nursing programs, receiving her master’s of science in nursing in 1978 and her PhD in 1990.

• Months after assuming the presidency of the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties, executive associate dean Lorna Finnegan, PhD ’93, MS ’88, BSN ’80, RN, FAAN, was selected as one of just 30 academic nurse leaders from across the nation to participate in the 2018 Wharton Executive Leadership Program in August, which is presented by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 9

Excerpts from DeVon’s blog written during her time in Rwanda

JAN. 1, 2018 Happy New Year, friends. The nearly two-year process of writing, submitting and awaiting the decision for my Fulbright is over. I write this from O’Hare Airport where the air temperature is a crisp 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The current temperature in Kigali is 65 degrees at midnight. My timing is impeccable.

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College of Nursing

JAN. 4, 2018 At this moment, I am writing from a tropical paradise. My black-and-white world has turned to technicolor.

In the foreground are rosebushes; in the background, spinach and lettuce. Pineapples are growing on the north side of the house, which is the sunny side in the southern hemisphere.

JAN. 13, 2018 Today I met my research partner, Dr. Brenda Asiimwe Kateera, and her beautiful family for the first time.

We discussed our grant aims and the systems of care in Rwanda.

Noncommunicable diseases are a growing problem in Africa and receive little attention. There is a need to target risk reduction as well as screening measures.

JAN. 17, 2018 Here is a picture of my traveling companion, Sparky. Sparky is the UIC Flames mascot. My colleague at the UIC College of Nursing, Mark Lockwood, wanted to be sure that I didn’t forget where my heart lies back home. Sparky has also been exploring our new environs. He likes this tree perch.

Snapshots of Rwanda

Professor Holli DeVon spent four months in Rwanda as a Fulbright scholar, working on a grant to study cardiovascular disease in HIV patients.

DeVon immersed herself in Rwandan life, calling it “life-changing” and chronicling her work and adventures in a blog.

T

he first lesson of living in Rwanda, says Holli DeVon, PhD ’02, MS ’82, RN, FAHA, FAAN, is this: Never leave home without a bottle of water and baby wipes.

“You never know what’s going to happen when you’re out,” says DeVon, UIC College of Nursing professor and head of the Department of Biobehavioral Health Science.

You might find yourself in a bathroom with no running water, or, as happened to her one day, on a nearly four-hour odyssey home due to road closures.

Her mission there: Study how various risk factors contribute to cardiovascular disease among patients with and without HIV. “It’s really important because HIV is a significant problem in sub-Saharan Africa, but now that treatment has improved quite a bit … patients with HIV are often living a normal lifespan,” she says. “Because they’re living a normal lifespan, they’re now susceptible to noncommunicable diseases like heart disease.” continued on the next page

DeVon spent the spring 2018 semester on a Fulbright grant in Rwanda, a four-month, jam-packed experience that she describes as life-changing.

FEB. 16, 2018 Dean Terri Weaver visited this week. We went to Volcanoes National Park to see the mountain gorillas made popular by Dian Fossey’s research and the film, “Gorillas in the Mist.” The altitude was 9,350 feet. I came around a tree and almost walked into a gorilla. Terri got a good laugh at the look on my face.

FEB. 23, 2018 This week, my collaborator Dr. Kateera and I decided that we would do a pilot study of our aims with some funding from Fulbright, analyze our data, and submit an R01 in the fall/winter. Our energies are now very focused.

MARCH 11, 2011 In February, the UIC faculty generously bought over 100 stethoscopes for students in the University of Rwanda School of Nursing. They were short 30 stethoscopes for students in the pediatric and neonatal programs. On Tuesday, we distributed them to the master’s students who had not received one in February. (see page 12)

APRIL 11, 2018 It is hard to believe that I have not written in two weeks. I have been consumed with trying to finish my IRB application, a draft of my grant, and a perspective paper before I leave on Saturday. I will truly miss the grandeur of this mountain paradise and the nearly ideal climate, but I am ready to come home.

You can read the full blog at devonrwanda.blogspot.com.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 11

Fulbright in her sights The Fulbright Scholar Program is the U.S. Department of State’s flagship academic exchange, offering teaching and research opportunities in more than 125 countries.

DeVon says she hopes the pilot data will be used to expand studies to examine other noncommunicable diseases, such as chronic kidney disease and hypertension.

Cultural immersion

DeVon says that she had her sights set on a Fulbright for the last 10 years, but a conversation with former dean Mi Ja Kim, PhD, steered her work to Rwanda. The College of Nursing has strong ties to the country as one of five nursing programs taking part in the Rwanda Human Resources for Health program (see page13).

The Fulbright is intended to be a cultural exchange and DeVon says she valued the opportunity to fully immerse herself in Rwandan life.

She stayed in the capital city of Kigali at the home of Rebecca White, MSN, FNP-BC, FPMHNP-BC, NE, a UIC College of Nursing mental health instructor working on the Human Resources for Health project.

When DeVon mentioned she was applying for a Fulbright, she recalls that Kim told her, “you can go to Rwanda. They need you there.” Two days later, DeVon had a letter of sponsorship from the University of Rwanda, a requirement for the application.

While there, DeVon kept a blog, sharing a glimpse of daily life in Rwanda. She describes awakening to “a symphony of unseen birds hidden in the trees and foliage” and seeing women carrying enormous bags on their heads. Most Rwandans in the mountainous country, only one-third the size of Illinois, don’t have cars; they walk or take small buses to get places.

DeVon, a highly regarded researcher in the area of heart disease, partnered with a Rwandan physician who is an HIV specialist, Brenda Asiimwe Kateera, MD. Noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease, are on the rise in Africa. Cardiovascular diseases have emerged as one of the most common causes of death in individuals with HIV. Patients with HIV tend to get cardiovascular disease 10 years earlier than a healthy person, according to a paper published in the Rwanda Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences, on which DeVon was the lead author.

Anti-retroviral therapy is accessible to many patients in Rwanda and has “turned HIV into a chronic disease, rather than a terminal one,” DeVon says.

DeVon and Kateera are conducting a pilot study of 30 patients to study the risk factors that may contribute to early onset of heart disease in patients with HIV, including both traditional factors—such as tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and alcohol use— and “novel” risk factors, such as inflammatory and immune factors detectable in the blood.

DeVon says living in Rwanda was critical to develop relationships with key partners so that she could effectively conduct research to improve patient care. She describes visiting two primary care clinics where she could conduct research with patients after meeting a University of Rwanda faculty member who founded one of the clinics.

“Relationships are important in Rwanda.” she says. “It is vital to build trust.””

That’s especially crucial given the country’s recent history. It’s only been 24 years since the 1994 genocide, which wiped out an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Rwandans during a 100-day period.

DeVon was there during the genocide commemoration week in April.

“It’s hard to find a person in Rwanda who wasn’t directly touched by the genocide,” DeVon says. “I cannot imagine not being changed by that experience, yet the Rwandans are quite optimistic.”

“That will help us design targeted interventions for patients to reduce their risk,” she says.

When Holli DeVon put out a call to colleagues asking for donations of stethoscopes and money for equipment for Rwandan students, UIC faculty, staff and alumni answered with a resounding and rapid response.

Thanks to faculty and staff—and a generous donation from alumna Brooke Richards, MS ’11—students and faculty at the University of Rwanda School of Nursing received 118 blood pressure cuffs with stethoscopes, 23 stethoscopes, 28 blood pressure cuffs, one fetoscope and other much-needed supplies.

The supplies went to 71 master’s students and 35 faculty members.

“The kindness of our community is amazing, but I knew that,” wrote Barbara McFarlin, then-head of the Department of Women, Children and Family Health Science, in a thank you email.

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•

A productive partnership In the final year of a seven-year program, UIC College of Nursing faculty have played an integral role in improving the quality of nursing in Rwanda.

Devastated by genocide in 1994, the east African nation of Rwanda faced a massive shortage of highly qualified physicians, nurses, midwives and other healthcare workers.

Jeff Williams, MSN, RN-BC, FAACM, teaching associate at UIC Nursing-Urbana, spent a year there, helping to overhaul a broken emergency room system at Centrale Hospital University of Kigali.

Enter the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program: An ambitious seven-year program that began in 2012 with the intent of building up the healthcare workforce and education s ystem in Rwanda.

“He’s still their hero,” says McCreary, who visited recently.

Led by former dean Mi Ja Kim, PhD, RN, FRCN, FAAN, UIC College of Nursing jumped on board as one of 13 institutions—five nursing schools, seven medical schools and one school of public health— chosen for the unprecedented program, which sought to increase both the number of nurses and the quality of nursing training available.

“When you think about where the health professions education system was when we started the project, they had an extreme shortage of faculty and qualified clinicians,” says Linda McCreary, PhD ’00, MS ’93, BSN ’73, RN, FAAN, UIC College of Nursing associate dean for global health and clinical associate professor.

“Operating the College of Health Sciences was really a challenge when they didn’t have faculty. How are you going to have a medical school or nursing school when there’s no one to teach?”

Now in the final year of the program, UIC has supported between two and 10 nursing faculty in Rwanda each year, says McCreary, to focus on such things as master’s level curriculum development, emergency room nursing management and hospital administrative and clinical mentorship.

One major goal of the program was to increase the education level of nurses in the country. Since the program’s inception, the total number of graduates with a bachelor’s of nursing degree has grown from 39 in 2012 to 341 in 2018, McCreary says.

There are also now eight tracks of master’s programs in nursing with an total of more than 209 graduates expected by 2019. Of the first cohort of master’s level graduates, 24 were offered and accepted nursing faculty positions in Rwanda.

Two more master’s level nursing programs are coming on board, both led by UIC nursing faculty. Pamela Meharry, PhD, CNM, RN and visiting clinical instructor, is helping to develop a master’s program in midwifery, and Rebecca White, is developing one in mental health.

McCreary says the intent of the program was to build capacity, so that Rwandan faculty would be able to take the reins once U.S. faculty leaves.

“They’re growing their own nursing faculty,” McCreary says. “There’s now a pathway for nursing education and development and for growing higher-level faculty.”

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Left: Tonda Hughes, PhD, ’89, professor emerita and former associate dean for health (left) and Dean Terri Weaver (right), meet with Sr. Epiphanie Mukabaranga, MPH, RN, the director of Rwamagana School of Nursing & Midwifery.

Middle: Former Dean Mi Ja Kim (left) and Mary Maryland, PhD ’94, who worked on the program from 2012 to 2014.

Right: (From left) Jeff Williams, teaching associate at UIC Nursing-Urbana, Rwandan nurse Christine Uwineza, Mi Ja Kim and Rwandan nurse Narcisse Renzaho, stand in front of Centrale Hospital University of Kigali in 2013.

Williams helped build an emergency nursing curriculum and made recommendations for triage and standards for emergent nursing practice.

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2018 Distinguished Alumni Award Winner

Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Paul Kuehnert: A daring career

Julie Creamer: Nurse executive

Mary Maryland: Nurse trailblazer

Judy Hicks: Nurse entrepreneur

Inspirational Alumni In 2018, we conferred our 40th annual Distinguished Alumni Award and inaugurated a new honor, the Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award.

2018 Distinguished Alumni Award Winner

had to do with engaging people around what I saw as all the hurt that was happening in society; that was really important.”

That commitment to fostering healing and change across communities has been the cornerstone of Kuehnert’s wideranging career.

At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Paul Kuehnert is working on “a compelling vision of change and improvement.”

Kuehnert, an associate vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s biggest health philanthropy, was chosen as the 2018 UIC College of Nursing Distinguished Alumni Award, the college’s highest honor for alumni.

“Throughout his career, Paul has based his success on the firm ethical and caring foundation of nursing,” wrote John R. Lumpkin, MD, MPH, senior vice president–program at RWJF, in a letter of support for Kuehnert’s nomination for the award.

“He has passion and compassion that is reflected in his work, rooted in his education at UIC, and honed through work experience.”

Kuehnert got his introduction to community-focused nursing as a nurse for the Head Start program, where he worked with preschool-aged children in his native St. Louis. One of the most successful interventions at stopping the cycle of poverty, Head Start taught him the importance of reaching children and families before they are sick.

“That’s when I really fell in love with the idea of working more with populations further ‘upstream,’ trying to work on disease prevention and health education,” he says.

Paul Kuehnert, DNP ’12, MS ’91, RN, jokes that he decided to become a nurse on a dare.

It was 1972 and unusual for men to go into nursing. Kuehnert’s older sister, who was a nurse, challenged him to consider the gender-bending role, he says.

Kuehnert admits he was drawn to the idea of choosing a nonconforming career. But he also was responding to the moment: The Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s.

“The thing that really intrigued me about nursing was the opportunity to be in caring and healing relationships with people,” he says. “Doing something meaningful, something that 14 |

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While working as a public health nurse for the Village of Oak Park, Illinois, in 1987, he was given the assignment of communicable disease follow-ups, which included working with a growing number of patients diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The epidemic was beginning to hit hard in the Chicago area.

Wanting better tools for working on that issue specifically— and public health more generally—Kuehnert enrolled in the UIC College of Nursing master’s degree program, with concentrations in public health nursing. “[The program] really seemed to put together all the things that I was most interested in and passionate about,” he says, adding that he learned about epidemiology, working with population health data, doing community assessments, and program planning. “It gave me that opportunity to understand how best

Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Julie Creamer: Nurse executive After Julie Creamer, MS ’91, RN, got her master’s degree in administrative studies from UIC College of Nursing, she gave herself an ambitious goal.

“I said, ‘I want to be a chief nurse executive before I’m 40,’” she recalls. “It’s really the only job I’ve ever set my sights on.” to work with populations and work within a communitywide, populationwide approach to health.”

During that same time, Kuehnert was one of the co-founders and eventually CEO of Community Response, an HIV/AIDS social service organization that served the West Side of Chicago and the western suburbs.

Kuehnert’s next move took him to Atlanta for a consulting job, where he “re-connected” with his wife, Judith, who had earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at UIC’s School of Public Health. (They knew each other at UIC but didn’t strike up a romantic relationship until they met again in Georgia). Then he was on to Maine, where he worked for the Maine Bureau of Health, first as division director of disease control, then deputy director.

Later still, back in the Chicago area as county health officer and executive director for health in Kane County, Illinois, Kuehnert knew he wanted to come back to UIC to get his DNP with a focus on nursing leadership.

“It was just a tremendous experience,” he says. “I valued the fact that we had great faculty with practical experience leading us through academically rigorous, evidence-based curriculum and that we had peer colleagues to really share and learn from.”

Kuehnert took a leap to the national level with his job at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which awards $450 million in grants each year. As RWJF’s associate vice president– program, he oversees two of the organization’s goals: leadership and transforming health and healthcare systems.

Kuehnert says his mission is to develop a “compelling vision of change and improvement”—to try to solve for the “big macro problem,” which is that, among its roughly 35 peer countries, the U.S. spends the most on healthcare and has the worst population health outcomes.

Reflecting on his second degree at UIC Nursing, he says, “I think what the DNP program did for me was give me the grounding in science, the framework for looking at this problem at the systems-level, and the opportunity to really be in conversation with other nursing leaders in a structured way about how we transform healthcare.”

Over the last 28 years at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, she achieved and exceeded her goal. She became vice president of patient care and chief nurse executive of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in 1996, and is now hospital president and senior vice president of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, leading a staff of 6,000 at the top-ranked academic medical center.

And while her rise through the ranks as a nurse leader and administrator may seem preordained, it wasn’t always so.

Early in her career at Northwestern Memorial, a director encouraged her to return to school for a graduate degree. It left her with a pivotal decision.

Should she pursue a clinical track and get her DNP, which would allow her to work closely with patients? Or, already a manager, should she pursue a career in administration?

“I talked to my director, who was an influential mentor for me,” she says. “She said, ‘You like being in management. You can have a broader impact on patient care in a different way if you take the administrative track.’”

Once she’d chosen the master’s degree program at UIC, she said she found the environment stimulating, the faculty top-notch, and lessons applicable to her role and future aspirations.

Among her accomplishments at Northwestern Memorial, one she’s most proud of is developing a strategic plan to create an integrated academic health system under the umbrella of Northwestern Medicine.

“We’ve worked to make the patient experience seamless and very well integrated,” she says. “That traces back to my roots as a nurse. I think in terms of the patient’s perspective: How do we design care and services that exceed the patient’s expectations and that result in care that is both skilled and compassionate?”

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Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Outstanding Alumni Achievement Award

Mary Maryland: Nurse trailblazer

Judy Hicks: Nurse entrepreneur

When Mary Maryland, PhD ‘94, MSN, APRN, RN, FAAN, landed a consulting contract on diversity issues at NASA in the 1990s, she credited both her previous diversity work and the shoot-for-the-moon mentality that she gained at the College of Nursing.

“Definitely the notion of ‘taking it to the next level’ and considering possibilities—that for sure was cultivated within the College of Nursing doctoral program,” she says.

Maryland has been pushing boundaries her entire career.

In 1994, she became the seventh African-American student to earn a PhD at the College of Nursing. While at UIC, she co-authored the “I’M READY” grant, a $380,000 program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to introduce health careers to minority elementary school students. She spent a year in Rwanda working on the Human Resources for Health Partnership (see page 13). She has testified before a U.S. congressional committee on the need for healthcare reform and was a captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Nurse Corps.

Through it all, she’s also made patient care a priority, becoming a nurse practitioner after earning her PhD. “My nursing career has given me many, many opportunities,” she says. Her leadership experiences in nursing include serving as president of the Illinois Nurses Association and on the boards of directors of the American Nurses Association, the American Nurses Credentialing Center and the American Nurses Foundation.

Maryland also started a scholarship for UIC Nursing doctoral students in honor of her mentor, Marguerite Dixon, PhD ‘82, MS ‘72, BSN ‘59, the first African-American student to complete a PhD at the college.

Her strong desire to contribute has its roots with her parents, she says, and she got her “nursing gene” from her mom, a retired LPN (licensed practical nurse).

“Mary is a tireless optimist,” wrote Patricia Lewis, PhD ‘93, in a letter with which she nominated Maryland for the award. “For her, a ‘no’ simply implies some delay. She never gives up on her efforts to improve things for nurses, for nursing students and for her patients.”

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As a master’s student in the nursing administration program in the 1970s, Judy Hicks took classes with students in fields like business, medicine, engineering and other health sciences.

“The faculty really believed that nurses had to understand how different disciplines contributed to overall healthcare,” she says.

“That was a pretty strong tenet of the research that was going on there. It was a very exciting and vibrant organization.”

Hicks’ career launched after getting her master’s degree in 1975, taking a job as director of nursing at Prentice Women’s Hospital and then vice president for nursing at Children’s Memorial Hospital.

From her vantage point at the hospital, Hicks saw opportunities to deliver healthcare in better and less expensive ways. First, she developed and ran a for-profit subsidiary of Children’s Memorial, a home-healthcare model for pediatric and adult patients that operated for 16 years, until it was ultimately sold to a variety of healthcare providers in 2000.

Then, seeing another business opportunity, Hicks founded Focused Health Solutions, an innovative model that used budding ‘telehealth’ technology to connect nurses to patients with chronic medical problems.

Hicks worked directly with large employers, such as Commonwealth Edison, to implement the program, which had 45,000 patients when it was sold in 2007.

“Judy is a true ‘Renaissance leader’ who combines clinical experience, leadership talent and business acumen in her many contributions to healthcare in Chicago,” wrote Ann Scott Blouin, PhD ‘94, president at PSQ Advisory, in the letter she wrote to nominate Hicks for this award.

•

Alumni award nominations are accepted year-round at go.uic.edu/NursingAlumAwards.

Those received by Feb. 15, 2019, will be reviewed for the 2019 awards program.

Save the dates!

Alumni & Student Social: Urbana March 8, 2019

Students and faculty will be showcased, and alumni guests are certain to feel the pride.

Alumni & Student Social: Chicago March 19, 2019

Join students, faculty and fellow alumni for an evening of connecting over cocktails.

Spring events at our other campuses celebrate graduating students, engaged alumni and the entire community at each campus PEORIA: April 16, 2019 ROCKFORD: April 23, 2019 QUAD CITIES: April 30, 2019

Alumni from any campus are warmly invited to attend events nearest them.

Details about all these events will be posted as they become available at go.uic.edu/NursingAlumniEvents.

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©MERCY SHIPS

Hope Floats As director of a floating hospital, Nathan Claus, BSN ’08, uses the leadership lessons he learned at UIC to provide transformative surgery on an unusual platform.

On one of the first days that the Africa Mercy, the world’s largest private hospital ship, was docked in Cameroon last fall, a man approached the ship wearing a scarf over his face.

©MERCY SHIPS, CREDIT: SAUL LOUBASSA

Beneath it, a tumor the size of a cantaloupe had ballooned across his neck, mouth and cheek. The man, who traveled two days across the central African country to the ship, did not speak much. The tumor was bleeding and forced his mouth open.

“Ernest had a condition that, in any developed nation, would be caught on a routine dental exam or visit to the doctor’s office and promptly dealt with,” says Nathan

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Claus, BSN ’08, now hospital director on the Africa Mercy. “But Ernest’s tumor grew for more than 10 years without an intervention.”

For Claus, Ernest’s story was a familiar one.

At 33, Claus has been working on the Africa Mercy almost continuously for the last six years. The ship is the current vessel in service of four “floating hospitals” that have been operated by the international, faith-based organization Mercy Ships. It travels the coast of Africa, bringing free, life-changing surgery to citizens of developing nations thanks to the talents of an enormous crew of volunteers.

“It’s just a unique platform,” he says.

“We sail in bringing a very developed,

high-tech, first-class hospital into these underdeveloped nations. You’d walk into one of our [operating rooms] and it would look just like one at home.”

The mission could not be more needed.

About 5 billion people worldwide do not have access to safe, affordable and timely surgical and anesthesia care, according to the Lancet Commission for Global Surgery.

He came back to Mercy Ships as a nurse in 2012. With breaks of just a few months here and there, he’s been there ever since.

Floating hospital

When the Africa Mercy docks in a new port—which it does each August for a 10-month “field service”—people line up by the thousands, awaiting an opportunity to be seen by the ship’s doctors and nurses.

Roots run deep

When Claus arrived on the Africa Mercy as a volunteer nurse in 2012, he planned to stay for just three months.

He had been exposed to medicine in the developing world even earlier than that.

His dad, David Claus, UIC MD ‘79, was a pediatrician, and his mom, Esther Claus, was a nurse who also graduated from UIC, earning her BSN in 1975. Herself the daughter of a missionary nurse, Esther Claus spent her childhood in Guatemala; she and David took their children back there annually to work on a health- and community-development project.

“We wanted them to see medical needs in another country, and a perspective on life other than [what they saw in] the United States,” Esther Claus says.

But it wasn’t until that gap-year trip to Mercy Ships that Claus began considering a medical career for himself. After he enrolled in the UIC College of Nursing, he returned again to the ship, this time working as a surgical sterilizer between his last two years of nursing school.

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree, he worked at UC San Diego Health’s burn intensive care unit for four and a half years. Although he enjoyed his work there, he began to feel an itch to return to the developing world, he says.

©MERCY SHIPS, CREDIT: RUBEN PLOMP

It wasn’t his first time on the ship. Claus, who grew up in River Forest, Illinois, had spent six months volunteering aboard Mercy Ships during a gap year in between high school and college. Not trained to work in a medical role, he cleaned engines.

Before he was promoted to hospital director last spring, Claus oversaw the screening process, helping to select candidates for surgery.

The ship is a sea-borne hospital, with a 400-member crew, five operating rooms, and recovery and intensive care units. It delivers surgery in six specialty areas, including reconstructing cleft palates, repairing club feet and bowed legs in children, hernias and obstetric fistula, and removing cataracts.

Nathan Claus (right) assisting with patient screening in Madagascar, in 2015, to select those patients who had conditions that could be helped by Mercy Ships volunteer surgeons. (facing page, top) The Africa Mercy is the world’s largest private hospital ship, staffed by 400 volunteers from 40 nations. The floating hospital has five state-of-the-art operating rooms and ward bed space for 80 patients. (facing page, bottom) Nathan Claus serves as the hospital director onboard the Africa Mercy, which provides free life-changing surgeries for 10 months in each African nation where the ship docks.

“In a typical field service, we have somewhere around 2,500 surgical slots to offer within those six specialties,” Claus says. “We will see upward of 10,000 people interested in treatment. There’s a whole bunch of triage and prioritizing that needs to happen.

Unfortunately, probably 80 to 90 percent of people have something that doesn’t fall within our scope of practice.”

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In an hour-long episode of a National Geographic series called “The Surgery Ship” that documents life on the Africa Mercy, viewers see Claus struggling with the heartbreaking decision to send home a 17-month-old child, whom he believes will die at home because he doesn’t have the type of tumor the ship’s doctors can help.

“Everybody on the team has a difficult time with it,” he says. “I think one of the key things is we try to focus on the people we can help.

If you get too weighed down by all the need that’s out there, you won’t last long. We try to focus on the couple thousand we can help every year.”

Leadership lessons

Now hospital director, Claus reflects on his experience at the UIC College of Nursing as a place that modeled leadership.

“I have fond memories of my time at UIC,” he says. “I thought I had a very good all-around education and was exposed to a lot of leaders in the field of nursing.”

Like nearly all of the people working aboard the ship, including the captain and managing director, Claus is a volunteer. That means he has to raise support for his work. He pays for his room and board with funds from friends and family.

Esther Claus says that people want to support him because they know they aren’t or can’t do what he’s doing.

“He may be the hands and feet over there, but he’s there because people are helping him to be there,” she says. “That’s a great feeling—that you’re part of something bigger than yourself.”

Corné Blom, vice president of international programs for Mercy Ships, says Claus is a skilled ICU nurse with an in-depth knowledge of the hospital, but that he also has the “heart” needed for global health and developmental work.

“He is compassionate, humble and determined to make a difference,” Blom says.

Transformative experience During Claus’ most recent field service, in Cameroon, Ernest arrived hours before his scheduled appointment.

The ship had only just docked and the hospital wasn’t yet completely set up. But his tumor was bleeding and Claus didn’t feel comfortable telling him to wait, so he organized a stay for Ernest at a local hospital, where he got a blood transfusion. When the Mercy Ships hospital was up and running a week later, Ernest came aboard the Africa Mercy and had two surgeries, three months apart, to remove the tumor.

“He felt like an outcast,” Claus says. “He was very depressed and even suicidal at times because of his condition and the stigma associated with it. He really started getting life back into him as he was in the hospital. I distinctly remember the change in his eyes.”

Claus adds that seeing patients like Ernest motivates him to keep going.

“That’s something I really enjoy seeing,” he says. “That transformation. Not only physical, but also his outlook on life.”

•

Mercy Ships has many volunteer opportunities and critical needs for pediatric ICU nurses.

See mercyships.org/volunteer for more information.

National Geographic Australia aired a series about Mercy Ships, called “The Surgery Ship,” including an episode featuring Claus.

You can see clips of the show here: www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/surgery-ship

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©MERCY SHIPS, CREDIT: SHAWN THOMPSON

Claus acknowledges one of the challenges of the job is seeing all that need and knowing he can’t help many of them.

(top) At 27 years old, Ernest had suffered with a growing facial tumor for more than a decade.

He left his family and journeyed for two days alone to the ship, arriving in a dire state and in need of a blood transfusion. (bottom) After surgery to remove the large facial tumor, Ernest recovered physically and emotionally.

He was anxious to return home to show his wife and five-year-old son that he was healed.

EXPERT VIEWPOINT

There’s no magic pill

Nursing Collegiate Professor Ardith Doorenbos says nurses are well-positioned to lead a culture shift in this country away from opioid overuse.

I’m coming from Washington state. Out in Washington, we’d like to be known as the Evergreen State, but a statistic we’re not very proud of is that we have had more deaths due to opioids than car accidents.

This is a growing epidemic and a leading cause of death, not only in Washington, but also Illinois and around the country.

A lot of opioid use and misuse comes about when patients first have surgery. They are often prescribed for acute pain, but once it gets around to chronic pain— usually around three months after an acute episode like surgery—then it’s important to make sure we have other ways to manage pain, rather than opioids.

For some providers, the fastest and easiest way to manage chronic pain is by whipping out that prescription pad. That ends a clinic visit faster than anything.

But if a patient has been on opioids for a long time, it may not be about getting pain relief anymore. The body is craving it. It can become a substance-use disorder. To say that everyone will become addicted certainly is not the case, but the potential is there, and we need to be more mindful and careful about how we prescribe and manage chronic pain.

Something we’re working really hard to do is to provide tools and education about self-management pain strategies for our patients—strategies that don’t require any prescription at all. Some of these include physical

therapy, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and self-hypnosis. They do take more work on the part of the patient and the provider, but we certainly know that when a patient is engaged in his or her own healthcare, they have better outcomes.

Because many providers haven’t been trained on these strategies, I’ve been working on two projects in particular to decrease our reliance on opioids. The first one is a telehealth consult service called TelePain, which allows rural healthcare providers to access pain management specialists and get expert advice on complex cases.

The second is an app for the management of surgical pain, helping patients set realistic expectations about post-surgical pain and how to manage it.

Pain is complex and we need to treat it that way, both in its assessment as well as in our treatment. It’s a culture change in America that we really need to work on.

We’ve had the culture that a pill will fix most everything.

Instead, let’s help our patients focus on being more self-engaged and self-motivated to be as healthy as they can.

That’s a culture shift that we as nurses are wellpositioned to lead.

•

Doorenbos joined the Department of Biobehavioral Health Science as Nursing Collegiate Professor this year. She will also serve as the director of palliative care at the University of Illinois Cancer Center.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 21

Laurie Quinn, left, poses with some of the campers who attended the American Diabetes Association camp in Ingleside, Illinois, during the summer of 2018. Quinn has been volunteering there since 1980.

p m a C r i e Th n I

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FOR PEOPLE LIVING WITH DIABETES, LAURIE QUINN IS

Every summer, world-class diabetes researcher Laurie Quinn goes to camp.

“We spent three weeks at a diabetes camp and I was hooked,” Quinn says. “I learned more about diabetes in those three weeks than I had learned in my whole career to that point.”

She drives an hour northwest of Chicago to Camp Duncan YMCA in suburban Ingleside, Illinois, where she spends a week battling bugs and sunburn, eating in a mess hall with dozens of pre-teens and sleeping in the bottom bunk of a cabin.

The camp—which is put on by the American Diabetes Association for children with diabetes—helped spark her interest in diabetes as a master’s degree student in 1980. And she says her volunteer work there nearly every summer since has kept her grounded in the patient population she’s trying to help with her research.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to work with people with Type 1 diabetes, to help kids learn more about their disease and to bring students and other faculty along so they can see what it’s like to live with Type 1 diabetes,” she says.

Quinn, PhD ’96, RN, FAAN, FAHA, CDE, is now working with engineers at Illinois Institute of Technology to develop an artificial pancreas system. Her cutting-edge work is the reason she was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Mi Ja Kim Endowed Faculty Research Award, a three-year award intended to honor the career of a high-impact researcher. It’s the college’s first endowed faculty research award.

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s k r a p s Camp

CURIOSITY

Back in 1980, Quinn was skeptical when one of her friends in her master’s degree program at Rush University first suggested they do a clinical rotation at the American Diabetes Association camp, balking at the notion of spending the summer “at camp.”

But she was interested in the disease from her work on a medical floor at Rush Hospital, where she saw the severity of Type 1 diabetes and noticed that there were few options for treatment. So she went along with her friend, not knowing that the experience would shape her future research.

“We spent three weeks at a diabetes camp and I was hooked,” she says. “I learned more about diabetes in those three weeks than I had learned in my whole career to that point.”

In particular, she began to notice that the campers’ blood sugar would rise and fall after exercise in ways that defied textbook presentation. When she decided to get her PhD in nursing at UIC in 1988, she set her sights on studying how exercise affects people with diabetes, an area with little research at the time.

UIC is also where she met Mi Ja Kim, PhD, RN, FRCN, FAAN, former dean of the College of Nursing, who became her advisor and mentor.

“Dr. Kim guided me through the whole process of getting my research done and getting it done in a reasonable time and manner,” she says. “She was terrific.”

Their relationship made it a fitting coincidence when the college’s Research Committee chose Quinn as the first recipient of the Dr. Mi Ja Kim Endowed Faculty Research Award.

With the exception of a short break after her first visit to the American Diabetes Association camp, Quinn (above, with campers) has returned year after year for more than 30 years. (Below) Campers rely on Quinn to test their glucose levels at regular intervals and when they start to feel “low” during the day.

An unexpected phone call from a camp contact brought about the next big chapter in Quinn’s career.

Sitting at her desk one day in 2006, she got a call from a physician she knew from camp. He told her about a professor of chemical engineering at IIT, Ali Cinar, who was modeling the dynamics of glucose and insulin on people with diabetes.

That phone call spawned a working relationship between Quinn and Cinar that has lasted more than 12 years and may yield the first-ever completely automated artificial pancreas.

Type 1 diabetes is a disease in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin, which is needed to allow sugar, or glucose, to produce energy.

Quinn says that, until recently, someone with Type 1 diabetes would have to check his or her blood sugar level, then manually tell an insulin pump to inject insulin, particularly before meals.

Technological breakthroughs in sensors and continuous insulin pumps mean there are now devices that “talk” to an insulin pump and give insulin on demand. But, Quinn says, there’s still a fair amount of manual input needed, particularly before meals or exercise. That can be problematic, especially for the very young and very old.

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l u f s s e c A suc COLLABORATION

Quinn, Cinar and their teams are attempting to develop a device that receives information from glucose sensors and instructs the insulin pump to give the optimal dose without manual input of information; it’s what’s known as a closed-loop system.

What’s unique about their studies is they’re integrating other types of physiologic responses that can affect blood sugar, such as physical activity and stress. This provides information to the control system well before these events affect blood glucose levels.

Cinar says it’s been “critical having Laurie’s contributions, because she had been working for a number of years on the metabolism of people with diabetes, and in particular the effects of exercise on people with diabetes.”

After years of building algorithms, Cinar says they’re close to conducting clinical trials with an entirely closed-loop system, consisting of a glucose sensor and a wristband that reports physiological information wirelessly to a smart phone. The smart phone will then serve as the computational device that sends commands to the pump.

Their collaboration has been key to their success, he says.

Quinn conducts diabetes research in her lab at the UIC College of Nursing.

“The research that we’ve been doing for the past so many years couldn’t have been done if I were alone or if Laurie were alone,” he says.

On a sunny, 80-degree day in late July 2018, lunchtime at the American Diabetes Association camp begins very differently than at most camps.

More than 100 campers have convened in a noisy, air-conditioned mess hall and are sitting at tables, with bowls of chips covered in plastic in front of them.

They can’t start eating yet, though.

One by one, they need to check in with a member of the medical staff, as the volunteer nurses and doctors help them calculate how many carbs they’ll be eating at lunch and dial up their insulin pumps accordingly. Finally, after about 30 minutes, the parade to the medical tables is over, and the kids can dig in to a lunch of salad, chips, watermelon and chicken breast.

The camp relies on 25 to 30 medical staff volunteers, many of whom have University of Illinois connections. Quinn is one of two health teaching coordinators, making sure the campers are constantly watched for hypoglycemia. She and the other volunteers check the campers’ blood sugar at minimum seven to eight times a day, Quinn says, including after they’re in bed, until about 2 a.m.

“The goal of the camp is that a kid can have as good an opportunity as anywhere else,” Quinn says. “They can exercise and have fun without having to worry about anything, because they’re monitored very closely.

“There’s no sleep,” Quinn says with a laugh. “It’s a nonstop week. It’s a tough experience but it’s a positive experience.”

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Dr. Mi Ja Kim Endowed Research Award Reception to celebrate the career of Laurie Quinn will be held November 8, 2018, at the college’s Chicago Campus.

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Top row: Rocco Wlodarek teaches students to pack a wound and use a tourniquet (right).

Bottom right: Student Nurses for Social Justice president Michael Solomon at the Stop the Bleed training.

Students learn how to Stop the Bleed

A new student group, Student Nurses for Social Justice (SNSJ), organized the training as part of a mission to educate student nurses about societal issues that affect health.

UIC Nursing student Michael Solomon twists a tourniquet on the arm of a fellow student.

“Does it hurt?” he asks.

She shakes her head no, and he turns the rod again.

In this case—unlike in many nursing situations—he wants the answer to be ‘yes,’ because that would be a good sign that he’s tightened the tourniquet enough to stop a life-threatening bleed.

“We have a direct role as patient advocates in addressing inequality.”

—Michael Solomon, SNSJ president “It’s going to hurt a lot,” said Rocco Wlodarek, a certified emergency first responder who helped to conduct the training. “Don’t be gentle. You’re not going to hurt anything right now.”

The students were taking part in a “Stop the Bleed” training, a national initiative founded by the American College of Surgeons and the Hartford Consensus to teach bleeding-control techniques to the public. In the face of a bleeding emergency, an active shooter situation, or an explosion, anyone at the scene can act as a first-responder if they know what to do.

“As nurses, we work on the front lines,” says Solomon, the group’s president. “We see who’s getting sick, who’s getting better, and who’s continuing to get sick despite our best efforts. We have a direct role as patient advocates in addressing inequality.”

Kevin Chow, a surgery resident at the University of Illinois Hospital who led the Stop the Bleed training, said he’s focused on “training the trainers”—health professions students and practitioners who can then teach the skills to members of the public.

“Once we train other doctors, other nurses, medical students, nursing students, [then] they can go out into the community and teach other people,” said Chow. “These are the skills that save lives. They’re very basic. You don’t need much medical knowledge to act on these skills.”

After a tutorial on how to identify a life-threatening bleed, Chow brought out artificial limbs so the students could practice packing wounds with gauze and applying tourniquets.

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The training, attended by 15 nursing students, was organized by Student Nurses for Social Justice (SNSJ), a new student group at UIC. The group is dedicated to educating student nurses about issues that cause ill-health in society. In addition to the Stop the Bleed training, they’ve given health lectures to citizens returning from prison, hosted a restorative justice workshop, and had members of Cure Violence speak about the realities of gun violence in Chicago.

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©JOHN MOLLURA

IMPACT

Jane Sherman, photographed in her hometown in Delaware with her dog, Paddington.

A place of support

Jane Ehlinger Sherman, a nurse practitioner pioneer, chose to endow a professorship at UIC College of Nursing after her formative experience here.

When Jane Ehlinger Sherman, PhD, MS ’75, RN, was admitted to the UIC College of Nursing’s second class of nurse practitioners, it was still a nascent movement.

she also donated $300,000 to the Clifford Pilz Educational Fund in the College of Medicine, which was his alma mater.

“When I graduated in 1975, some physicians and nursing faculty doubted the profession of nurse practitioner would last,” she says.

Sherman came to UIC shortly after her husband was diagnosed with cancer. She recalls strong support from the university for both her and her husband, who was starting his post-graduate training and fellowship in cardiology at the University of Illinois. His treatment was successful at the time. He died last year at the age of 71.

Her experience as a student and clinical faculty member at UIC had a formative effect on her life and career, leading her to donate a $1 million gift to the College of Nursing to endow a professorship. In memory of her late husband, Richard Sherman, MD, 26 |

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“It was such a supportive place for me, with my husband just being diagnosed. We didn’t know where that was

IMPACT

going to go,” she says. “They supported me and my personal life and my career.”

Back then, the nurse practitioner profession was just being forged. There were programs where nurses could earn a certificate, Sherman recalls, but she wanted a rigorous course of study. Then she heard that Virginia Ohlson, PhD, was starting a new master’s in public health nursing at UIC that would lead to becoming a nurse practitioner.

“I was very excited about the nurse practitioner program, in terms of giving nurses a larger voice in healthcare and more expertise at assessing patients and being able to treat them,” she says.

After graduating from the program, she took a newly-formed “teacher-practitioner” position at UIC, where she had a 60 percent appointment as faculty and 40 percent as a clinician. Students could gain experience by shadowing Sherman and her patients.

“I was very excited about the nurse practitioner program, in terms of giving nurses a larger voice in healthcare and more expertise at assessing patients and being able to treat them.”

“As a faculty member, you could actually see, moment to moment, how the student worked and how she accessed information from the patient,” Sherman says. “The whole experience I had at the UIC College of Nursing was one of collegial relationships between faculty and students.”

Sherman moved from Chicago in 1977 when she and her husband started a practice in Delaware, he as a noninvasive cardiologist and she as an adult-gerontology nurse practitioner. She went on to get her PhD from the University of Maryland in 1985 and worked as a faculty member at two nursing colleges before opening her own holistic nursing practice.

As she watched nurse practitioners take on an accepted role in clinic and hospital settings, UIC held a special place in her heart.

“Having spent much of my career on the East Coast, I still treasure the time I had at the University of Illinois [at Chicago] because that filled me with wonder and responsibility,” she says. “I hope this gift expresses the gratitude that I have carried with me all my days.”

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Lifting the burden

Carolyn Dystrup wants to relieve students’ concerns about costs.

Carolyn Dystrup, BSN ’70, MS, RN, graduated with her bachelor’s degree debt-free. But she realizes many students today are not so lucky.

That’s why she decided to create a $25,000 scholarship fund for UIC Nursing students. Her gift, and others like it, are crucial as the college strives to triple the number of students supported with scholarships each year. That’s a primary goal for the college under IGNITE: The Campaign for UIC. “Last year, thanks to scholarship giving, we were able to support 100 students with scholarships, more than ever before,” said Steven George, assistant dean for advancement. “But with almost 1,500 students enrolled, there’s a lot of room for growth. If the majority of our alumni and friends participate in making gifts to the Annual Fund or our college scholarship funds, we can accomplish this ambitious goal.”

He added: “We are especially thankful to Carolyn for leading the way by establishing her own scholarship fund.”

Dystrup says she hopes her gift will help students follow through on their goals of completing their degrees. She recalls that she got a stipend of $300 a month when she was a student in Chicago, which helped her cover some of her fees.

“It was a nice addition to help get through those years,” she says. “When I finished, I owed nothing in the way of tuition.

I was very grateful for that, especially as one of five kids.”

Dystrup and her husband moved to Joliet, Illinois, where she got her master’s degree from Northern Illinois University and spent her career teaching, including at Joliet Junior College. There, she saw many adult students who struggled to balance school with work.

“They were working part time or full time to pay tuition,” she says. “I thought, ‘What a burden to have while you’re going through a nursing program.’ It’s so important to have help with tuition and not have that stress of saying, ‘I don’t know how am I going to pay my tuition.’”

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VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 27

IMPACT

A scholar’s story

Funding helps student study and serve

Jessica Wardach, who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in May 2018, fell in love with nursing when she volunteered as a new undergraduate at CommunityHealth in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, the largest free health clinic in the nation.

So when she started at UIC, she wanted to continue—and strengthen—her volunteer commitments.

“For me, this scholarship relieved some financial pressure, allowing me not only to focus on my studies, but to also have time to participate in co-curricular activities and volunteer opportunities across the city,” she said.

During her time at the UIC College of Nursing, Wardach volunteered at the Chicago Marathon medical tent, organized a blood drive and toy drive, served as a peer mentor, and worked as a student nurse assistant at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “[Scholarships] also provide students with something equally if not more important: recognition of a job well done,” she said.

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Scholarships helped her do that, said Wardach when she spoke in April at the college’s Donor & Scholar Recognition Luncheon, which brought donors together with the students they help. Wardach was one of the recipients of the Dorothy Mayer Memorial Endowed Scholarship.

Donor Judith McDevitt, PhD ’97, BSN ’88, celebrates with Susan Hovers at the 2018 Donor and Scholar Recognition Luncheon.

Hovers was the recipient of the Dean Joan L. Shaver Scholarship, which McDevitt supports.

GOAL: 33M PROGRESS: 20.2M

61%

PROGRESS AS OF 9/1/2018

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UIC Nursing’s progress toward IGNITE goal The college has raised $20.2 million toward an ambitious goal of $33 million as part of IGNITE: The Campaign for UIC. The campaign, a $750 million comprehensive fundraising initiative, publicly launched in fall 2017 and will run through 2022.

RESEARCH ROUND-UP

Academic metrics hold steady with implementation of holistic admissions After implementing a “holistic admissions” strategy in 2014, the UIC College of Nursing suffered no drop in academic metrics, according to an evaluation published in the Journal of Nursing Education that looked at the outcomes of the first two graduating classes of bachelor’s degree students under the new admissions policy.

“We want diversity in our nursing graduates, because we want diversity in our future nursing faculty. This will help increase the diversity of the nurses who are caring for an increasingly diverse population of patients.”

—Linda McCreary

admissions, we’d be somehow reducing the quality of those admitted,” said Linda McCreary, PhD ’00, MS ’93, BSN ’73, RN, FAAN, clinical associate professor and one of the study’s co-authors.

“And that hasn’t happened.”

In the past, the College of Nursing based admission on GPA, test scores and personal essays. But with the introduction of holistic admissions, the college began including an interview portion as well, offering applicants an added opportunity to reveal personal qualities that may make them desirable additions to the nursing profession.

Holistic admissions is a process of considering applicant experiences and attributes as well as academic metrics when making admissions decisions.

The strategy is considered one tool in increasing the diversity of the nursing workforce. Racial and ethnic minorities make up more than 38 percent of the population but only 19 percent of the nursing workforce, according to the study.

“We, as faculty, may have these worries that, with holistic

There were no significant changes in average admission science GPA,

overall GPA, two-year graduation rate or first time NCLEX pass rates, according to the paper, which was co-authored by Julie Zerwic, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, dean and professor of the University of Iowa College of Nursing; Linda Scott, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, dean and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Nursing; and Colleen Corte, PhD, RN, FAAN, associate professor at the UIC College of Nursing.

The paper also found that Hispanic students were admitted at much higher rates after implementation of holistic admissions—from 8.2 percent in 2013 to 18.9 percent in 2016. White students decreased from a high of 59.1 percent in 2013 to 44.4 percent in 2016.

“We want diversity in our nursing graduates, because we want diversity in our future nursing faculty.

This will help increase the diversity of the nurses who are caring for an increasingly diverse population of patients,” McCreary said.

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RESEARCH ROUND-UP

Cancer screening guidelines inadequate for high-risk minorities When UI Health nurse practitioner Mary Pasquinelli, MS ’14, identified that lung cancer screening guidelines didn’t seem to have the desired effect for her patient population, she knew she needed to dig deeper.

Now, data she’s collected from a UIC lung cancer screening program provides evidence that national lung cancer screening guidelines

“These data show us that we really need to start thinking about more expansive, risk-based screening guidelines, especially if we want to close the gap when it comes to racial disparities in lung cancer outcomes.”

—Mary Pasquinelli

may be insufficient for individuals in underrepresented communities.

Pasquinelli, a current student in the UIC doctor of nursing practice program, is lead author on a study published in JAMA Oncology.

She says that the article is intended to be the first in a series aimed at influencing public policy for expanded lung cancer screening criteria.

According to the American Lung Association, African-Americans not only get lung cancer at a higher rate than other groups, but they are also more likely to die from the disease. The ALA reports that African-American men, for example, are 22 percent more likely to die from lung cancer than white men.

Pasquinelli says that the guidelines for lung cancer screening should

be examined to see if additional risk factors, like a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and having a close relative with lung cancer or a low education level, among other socioeconomic factors, should be considered alongside age and tobacco use when evaluating a person’s eligibility for screening.

“We know screening is effective, but these data show us that we really need to start thinking about more expansive, risk-based screening guidelines, especially if we want to close the gap when it comes to racial disparities in lung cancer outcomes,” Pasquinelli said. “Otherwise, continued use of screening guidelines that are skewed toward the white population could actually increase racial disparities in outcomes.”

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Do zoning policies affect your health?

A national study will allow researchers in the UIC College of Nursing to look at how community zoning policies and environments— such as walkability and access to parks and fitness centers—affect the health of residents.

Nursing Collegiate Professor Shannon Zenk, PhD, MS ‘99, MPH, RN, FAAN, is co-principal investigator, along with Sandy Slater, research associate professor in the School of Public Health, on the $150,000 one-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Data for Action program.

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Elizabeth Tarlov, PhD, RN, College of Nursing assistant professor, is also a co-investigator.

“We’re looking at how zoning code reforms influence people’s weight,” Zenk said. “These are policies that shape how pedestrian-friendly the environment is for walking, biking, running and, really, active living.”

Zenk said the study is unique because the researchers have access to longitudinal data on patient body weight, demographics and health status from athenahealth for an estimated 11 million people

across the country and across the lifespan. They’ll be able to link that information to national policy and environmental data from their own existing data sets.

“Ultimately, the goal is to inform policy change,” Zenk said. “If we find that there is a relationship between pedestrian-friendly zoning and healthier weights, then we hope to disseminate it to policy-makers and advocates to try to bring about change locally, and on a larger scale, in terms of promoting these types of community designs and development.”

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RESEARCH ROUND-UP

Professor Phoenix Matthews named Distinguished Researcher Phoenix Matthews, PhD, the College of Nursing Helen K. Grace Diversity Scholar, whose research is aimed at reducing cancer-related health disparities among vulnerable and underserved populations, has been chosen to receive the 2019 UIC College of Nursing Distinguished Researcher Award.

Matthews’ research is focused on tobacco use and cancer among racial, ethnic and sexual minority populations, groups which are at

elevated risk for poor cancer-related outcomes. She is principal investigator of one of the first NIH-funded, randomized clinical trials of a tailored smoking cessation treatment for LGBT smokers. The results of the study will help inform treatment approaches for that population, which smokes at two to three times the rate of the national average.

more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and five book chapters stemming from her research on cancer prevention and control. She is also associate professor and clinical psychologist in the UIC College of Medicine department of psychiatry and serves as the director of the recruitment and retention core at UIC’s NIH-funded Center for Clinical and Translational Science.

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Matthews, who has been at the college since 2003, has published

Students don’t read, understand energy drink labels Almost 40 percent of college students don’t read product labels on ubiquitous energy drinks, and about a quarter of those students said they don’t understand them, according to a study co-authored

by Janet Thorlton, PhD ‘10, MS ‘04, RN, CNE, clinical associate professor at the Urbana campus of the UIC College of Nursing.

The findings are important because many of these drinks contain stimulants that could create dangerous interactions if the student has an undiagnosed medical condition, mixes it with alcohol, or is already taking prescription medication containing a stimulant, such as Ritalin, Adderall or asthma inhalers, Thorlton said.

“It’s very difficult to determine caffeine consumption by looking at a label,” she said. “Let’s say you decide to buy a caffeine-free version of an energy drink. That may mean

it doesn’t contain the ingredient caffeine, but it could contain other herbal stimulant ingredients, such as guarana, which has about twice the concentration of caffeine found in coffee.”

Thorlton and her co-author, William Collins, clinical associate professor at Purdue University, surveyed 283 students from a large university about their attitudes toward energy drinks for the study, which was published in the Western Journal of Nursing Research.

The study also found that only 18 percent of respondents followed recommended dosages on labels or were aware that some products contained more than one serving.

Triggering the study is the fact that serious injury and death are linked to energy drink consumption, Thorlton said.

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VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 31

FOCUS ON EDUCATION

Care for the incarcerated Thanks to a grant from the Hillman Foundation, the UIC College of Nursing is providing health services to detainees, including a course that takes students inside Cook County Jail.

Student Jeremy Baker stands in front of eight men.

They are seated on metal benches, wearing khaki prison scrubs with DOC—Department of Corrections—stamped in big, black letters on their backs.

Two heavy metal doors and a Cook County Sheriff’s Office deputy separate the group from the hallway.

“Raise your hand if you have a place where you felt very relaxed,” Baker says to the men, his voice echoing off cinderblock walls. “It could be the beach or the woods.

Your ‘happy place.’”

Jeremy Baker, right, and Chris O’Brien, both students in the graduate-entry master’s program, teach Cook County Jail detainees in a men’s veterans tier about stress as part of a public health practicum.

Each Tuesday during the spring semester they brought health education to three tiers, or groups, of detainees.

Baker is one of 18 UIC College of Nursing master’s degree students who, during the spring semester, completed a clinical rotation in Cook County Jail in Chicago. Each Tuesday, the students passed through a gauntlet of metal detectors and checkpoints to provide health education to detainees.

The public health practicum is one of three correctional health initiatives of the College of Nursing that are getting a boost under a one-year grant from the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropies dedicated to advancing health through nursing.

The Innovations in Care Catalyst Award of $150,000 is allowing the college to: • provide health education to detainees at Cook County Jail with weekly visits from graduatelevel students; • meet with individuals who are on early release at a Cook County support center, sharing health information and helping them navigate to primary and mental healthcare at the UIC College of Nursing’s Mile Square Health Center in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood; • create a CEU-eligible, web-based module focused on healthcare delivery and health issues pertinent to a correctional facility and population.

The intent of the programs is to close gaps in healthcare for the incarcerated population, both by reaching detainees who are still inside Cook County Jail and also by informing them of their option to seek care at the Mile Square clinic once they’ve been released, says Susan Corbridge, PhD ’09, APRN, FAANP, associate dean for practice and community partnerships. The educational module will help spread best practices to healthcare faculty and students across the country.

Corbridge says recently released detainees are especially at risk for health problems, suffering from high rates of substance abuse, chronic illness and infectious disease.

“Ninety-five percent of people who are incarcerated will eventually be released back to the community,” Corbridge says. “This is just a group that’s lost. They have limited access to healthcare within that first year of release. They use the ER a lot. They also have a higher mortality rate during that time.”

CHANGING HEALTH OUTCOMES At their weekly visits to the jail, the UIC nursing students conduct an informal needs assessment with the detainees to find out what health topics they are most interested in. The practicum is team taught by Rebecca Singer, DNP ’18, RN, clinical instructor, and Geraldine Gorman, PhD, RN, clinical associate professor. Each week, the students present information on the topics— things like nutrition, aging or sexually transmitted infections—to three tiers, or groups, of detainees.

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“I love working with this population because we get extended time with them, week after week,” says Kristen Hanauer, MS ’17, who did a rotation in the jail before she graduated from the College of Nursing. She’s now working with the college on the grant. “If you can educate them on one or two aspects of primary care, it can change their health outcomes for the rest of their life.

The main thing is to empower them so when they aren’t here, they continue to find healthcare.”

‘WALKING MUCH STRAIGHTER’ One week in April, the group was talking about stress: what it does to the body and exercises the detainees can do to relieve it.

Military flags—POW/MIA, Coast Guard, Navy—and a soldier’s creed poster line the walls in the men’s veterans tier. The deck is loud. Someone is on the phone, and officers occasionally interrupt by shouting for detainees to come get medication.

Baker and another student, Chris O’Brien, explain the affects that stress can have on different parts of the body.

Baker shows the detainees how to focus their breathing and visualize being in a relaxing place.

(above) UIC Nursing student Amanda Cunningham leads detainees in a women’s tier through a series of stretching exercises to start the health education program. (below,clockwise from top left) Jeremy Baker teaches detainees about stress. The students take turns each week leading sessions on health topics chosen by the detainees.

Clinical instructor Rebecca Singer teaches the course.

Clinical associate professor Geraldine Gorman, one of two instructors in the public health practicum, chats with a detainee after the session.

Jose Sosa, a detainee in the tier, tells Baker he feels most relaxed at home, watching TV from his favorite chair.

“You can go there in your mind,” Baker says.

Later, in an interview, Sosa—who worked as a barber before his arrest—says the nursing students helped him to combat his sciatica by bringing him exercises he can do while in jail.

“I’m walking much straighter,” he says.

Cook County Sheriff’s Officer Mary McCormick, who works at the jail, says she thinks the visits from the UIC students “are phenomenal.”

“Everybody needs to hear about exercise, diet, stress releasers,” she says. “Regardless of whether you’re here, or if you’re in the outside world, these are things we need as human beings. I think it’s great because we don’t hear it enough.”

Calling it a unique experience, O’Brien says he’s enjoyed his rotation at the jail, adding that it gives him a different perspective than the typical bedside nursing rotation.

“This gives [the detainees] the skills they need to be more successful when they get back out,” he says.

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UIC Nursing AROUND THE STATE PEORIA/QUAD CITIES/ROCKFORD/ SPRINGFIELD/URBANA

An interprofessional approach

dietician students from UIC, OSF Saint Francis Medical Center and Bradley University. Students broke into teams to do small group simulations with standardized patients.

Nurses work with physicians, social workers and other professionals to deliver care in the “real world,” so shouldn’t they learn how to work in teams as students?

That’s the rationale for several interprofessional education “immersion days” throughout the college, a growing pedagogy to prepare students for collaborative practice.

“What’s valuable about this for students is that it gives them the opportunity to reflect on their own roles within patient care and also to better understand other roles in the system,” said Kathleen Sparbel, PhD, MS ’96, director of the Quad Cities Campus. “It’s about building that collegial relationship in concert with the patient.”

“Research has shown that interprofessional education leads to successful collaborations among disciplines resulting in more efficient, cost-effective care and improved patient outcomes,” said Krista Jones, DNP ’11, MS ’09, MSN ’07, director of the Urbana Campus.

Urbana poverty simulation: About 65 Urbana nursing, medicine and social work students conducted a poverty simulation on Nov. 14, 2017. Students simulated living in poverty for one month, facing challenges such as losing a job and not having enough money to pay bills. They also engaged in a clinical case study.

Every campus within the college has embraced it, including a day in Chicago that draws 800 students from 11 professions.

Multicampus immersion day: This training in Peoria in April 2018 drew about 250 students—including UIC Nursing students from Peoria, the Quad Cities, Springfield and Urbana. It also included medicine, social work, pharmacy, dentistry, counseling, physical therapy and

Rockford: In January, Rockford nursing students participated in the Interprofessional Education Day at the university’s Health Sciences Campus in Rockford.

About 200 students took part, including those from UIC medicine, pharmacy and OSF Saint Anthony College of Nursing. Rockford University theater students played the roles of standardized patients in a simulated hospital discharge setting.

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URBANA

Spotlight: Brian Brauer Before Brian Brauer, BSN ’97, joined the first class of BSN students on the Urbana campus, he was a volunteer firefighter and paramedic. He blends his roots as a first-responder and his passion for nursing as associate director at the Illinois Fire Service Institute, the state fire academy.

V.S. How did you end up working at the Illinois Fire Service Institute?

B.B. My wife was working full-time nights for the local sheriff’s department and I was working full-time nights as an RN in the emergency department. When our younger son was born, that shift schedule was an increased burden on us, and I applied for a full-time instructional position at the state fire academy.

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V.S. How did your nursing education at UIC prepare you for that role?

B.B. The leadership, management and clinical delegation skills that were part of my BSN coursework played a large role in qualifying me for a leadership position to design and implement firefighter training programs. It also gave me an advantage when we sought to improve safety in training and reduce the number of ambulance transports from live-fire training schools.

V.S. How do you use nursing in your current role?

B.B. I play a role in health and safety at the fire academy, helping to ensure that trainees are medically fit for service. I also review all injury reports and identify trends and recommend corrective or preventative actions.

More recently, I’ve been designated as the campus EMS coordinator at the University of Illinois and provide support to the groups who provide emergency medical services on our campus.

AROUND THE STATE

ROCKFORD

Two Rockford students win research award

Kelly Rosenberger, DNP ’12, CNM, WHNP-BC, FAANP, director of the college’s Rockford campus who also served as faculty mentor, called it a “milestone” that the nursing students were recognized at the competitive event. Both are in the adult-gerontology acute care nurse practitioner program.

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PEORIA College of Nursing DNP students Jessica Roche, left, and Dawna McMillan, right, accept their award from Dr. Inis Bardella.

Two Rockford DNP students won an award for their research poster at Rockford Research Day, held on April 27 at the UIC Health Sciences Campus in Rockford.

About 85 student researchers from across health sciences disciplines presented research.

Jessica Roche and Dawna McMillan were given the CCTS Best Clinical-Translational Research Poster by the UIC Center for Clinical and Translational Science for their poster entitled “Sedation vacation: Policy implementation and decreasing ventilator days in critical care patients.”

Peoria held its Honors Dinner on April 10, 2018. The Robah Kellogg Alumni Recognition Award was presented to Maureen Mathews, MS ’94, whose work at the Illinois Neurological Institute is focused on caring for those who have suffered a stroke or are at risk of stroke.

The keynote speaker was Matthew Saxsma, MS ’15, FNP, who founded Redefine HealthCare in Springfield, Illinois, a clinic utilizing the direct primary care model.

PEORIA

Spotlight: Andrea D. Parker When Andrea D. Parker, MS ’96, finished her BSN at Bradley University, she swore she was done with school.

But a month later, she enrolled in the master’s program at UIC. Parker is executive director of the Hult Center for Healthy Living in Peoria, a nonprofit provider of wellness and health education.

V.S. Why did you decide to return for your master’s?

A.P. When I was completing my BSN, I was working a night shift as well as expecting my second child, so it was an exhausting time for me. However, after the birth of our daughter, and as I became more adjusted to a regular day shift schedule, I had the energy for learning.

With the financial support of my employer hospital, it was a no-brainer to continue my nursing education.

I had attended the University of Illinois in Urbana after high school, so I really wanted to be a University of Illinois graduate.

V.S. What’s rewarding about your position as executive director of the Hult Center?

A.P. My role at the Hult Center is all that I have ever imagined. It’s a combination of health education— where I use my nursing knowledge—and community engagement. As the administrator, I am responsible for fundraising, donor development and ultimate program oversight. I also oversee the In School Health program, developing school-based healthcare access points for underserved children. I enjoy being part of a team that is passionate about its work.

V.S. How did your UIC nursing degree prepare you for your current role?

A.P. By having my master’s in nursing from UIC, I am prepared for the healthcare world we are faced with today and I am recognized as a leader in the community.

VITAL SIGNS FALL 2018 | 35

AROUND THE STATE

QUAD CITIES

Three former Quad Cities directors win Legacy Award Three former directors of the Quad Cities Campus were the recipients of the 2018 Quad Cities Director’s Legacy Award, which honors individuals who promote the continuity of the program and have given service to the unit.

Kathleen Sparbel, current director, said the recipients were “the foundation of establishing the UIC Quad Cities Campus and of shaping not only the program, but the lives of our graduates.”

Kathleen Hanson Dates of service: April 1990-August 1993 and August 1998-July 2002 “Kathy Hanson brought a strong background in community engagement, collaboration building, program development, curriculum, public health, and historical perspective,” Sparbel said. “She was instrumental in establishing the QC program for RN to BSN education and was the first UIC faculty in Quad Cities.”

(left to right), Kathleen Hanson, Pamela Hill and Kathleen Sparbel.

Mary Ann Anderson was unable to attend.

Mary Ann Anderson Dates of service: September 2010-January 2012.

“Mary Ann Anderson inspired scores of students to consider scholarship as something nurses could not only understand, but were well positioned to create,” Sparbel said. “Many of our alumni were proud to present at professional conferences and publish research under her mentoring.”

Pamela Hill Dates of service: August 1994-August 1998 and August 2002-August 2010.

“Pam Hill showed students what it meant to have true passion for research and scholarship,” Sparbel said. “To her credit, many of her students were better scholars and understood the rigors of statistics and of perseverance through scholarship, having worked with her.”

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QUAD CITIES

Spotlight: Michael Patterson

V.S. What led you down a leadership path?

Over the course of his career, Michael Patterson, MS ’05, RN, FACHE, has gone from enlisted member of the Navy, to trauma nurse, to president and CEO of Mississippi Valley Health in Davenport, Iowa.

M.P. In the Navy, I had opportunities to see the impact of nursing across the globe – both the clinical side and leadership aspects. At UIC, the diversity of the curriculum allowed me to learn about several different aspects of nursing leadership and prepared me for the various executive roles I have held over the last 15 years. The most rewarding aspect of my role is working with the other leaders within our system and watching them continually improve the care we provide for patients.

V.S. How did you go from the Navy to nursing?

M.P. I was fortunate enough to have two influences steering me toward nursing: my mother, Marsha L. Roman, BSN ’89, and the military. I was selected for a program developed by the Navy to encourage currently enlisted military members to pursue college degrees.

The ability to combine a degree that would lead to a commission as a naval officer and allow me to help people while serving my country really struck me as unique and something I should pursue.

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V.S. What are some of your fondest memories from getting your degree at UIC-Quad Cities?

M.P. The professors at the UIC Quad Cities campus, along with my other student colleagues, really created an environment that championed the nursing profession as a whole and allowed us to cultivate relationships within our community.

AROUND THE STATE

PEORIA

DNP student wins NBNA award Ebonie Wright, a DNP student in the advanced population health nursing program, was selected to receive a National Black Nurses Association’s “45 Under 40” Award.

The award honors and celebrates NBNA members who are 40 years old or younger and show strong leadership, excellence and innovation in their practice setting, NBNA chapters and communities.

“These young leaders are the way forward for our communities and our organization,” said Eric J. Williams, NBNA president. “The young leaders are the future of nursing.”

The award was given at the organization’s 47th anniversary celebration in St. Louis in August.

Wright also received the Norma Kelly/Robah Kellogg Scholarship from the Peoria Campus.

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ROCKFORD

Spotlight: Laura Monahan Laura Monahan, DNP ’16, MS ’12, MBA, RN, came to nursing late in life. She was in her 40s, after she’d already “retired” from a successful career with Commonwealth Edison. Monahan recently left her role as chair of the nursing program at Rockford University to take a position as assistant professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences.

V.S. What brought you to the nursing field?

L.M. I became interested in pursuing a nursing degree when my husband had a cancer scare. A good friend was going through a similar experience and had limited resources and knowledge. I decided that we were not going to experience the same scenario that he did due to a lack of knowledge and its associated terror. I chose the graduate-entry master’s program at UIC because of its reputation, targeted student population and streamlined processes. I kept going for my DNP at the

Rockford Campus because I enjoyed the challenge and vigor of the coursework and all the wonderful people I met in the program.

V.S. What do you like about teaching?

L.M. I like helping shape the futures of the next generation in nursing, mentoring others, expanding their horizons, and “paying it forward.” I firmly believe in servant leadership.

V.S. How did your UIC nursing degree help you get where you are?

L.M. A UIC nursing degree compels you to think bigger: expand your vision for nursing, look at perspectives on a broader, global scale, and increase your capacity for creative solutions.

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AROUND THE STATE

©JASON JOHNSON

SPRINGFIELD

Hotspotting in Springfield Twelve Springfield BSN students took part in a sixmonth long program to learn “hotspotting,” a process of identifying hospital super-users to help them find better, more cost-effective medical care.

“Some of these people, really, they’ve been abandoned,” said Jennie Van Schyndel, clinical instructor at UIC Nursing-Springfield. “The healthcare system has just not worked for them.”

SIU’s Tracey Smith, DNP, visits a patient identified as a hospital super-user through the hotspotting program.

SIU is the hub for the interprofessional program.

“Some of these people, really, they’ve been abandoned. The healthcare system has just not worked for them.”

—Jennie Van Schyndel, clinical instructor at UIC Nursing-Springfield

Through the program, the students worked in teams to help nine patients with complex histories avoid the hospital visits. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, super-users represent one percent of patients, yet account for up to 30 percent of healthcare costs.

The program kicked off with a day-long training on Sept.

9, 2017, at SIU’s School of Medicine in Springfield, one of four hubs that serve as centers for training and mentorship across the country. Attendees represented an array of healthcare professions and came from institutions including the University of Chicago, Emory

SPRINGFIELD

Spotlight: Oluwaseun “Olu” Akorede Growing up in Nigeria, Oluwaseun “Olu” Akorede, BSN ’18, RN, cared for her siblings and her grandfather, who was very ill before he died. It prompted her to want to be a nurse. A member of the Springfield Campus’ first graduating BSN class, she recently took her first nursing job on the medical-surgery floor at Memorial Health System in Springfield.

O.A. There’s a wide range of age groups and types of patients. We get patients with G.I. problems and post-operative surgical patients. I think it’s an excellent place where I can learn a variety of skills.

V.S. What attracted you to nursing?

O.A. Nursing requires hard work and serious dedication and so it was not unexpected that it was challenging.

There were days I felt like quitting the program. On other days, however, I felt so good that I thought I would never want to leave. I will never forget my professors. They respected us. It has also inspired me to be gentle with potential subordinates and to teach people in the most compassionate way.

O.A. I have loved caring for people since I was 6 years old. As a nurse, I am given the privilege and delicate responsibility of caring for injured, sick and dying patients. This gives me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of my patients by giving care to them in their time of need—just as I would want someone to do for me if I were in their position.

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College of Nursing

V.S. Why did you want to work on the medicalsurgery floor?

V.S. What was memorable about the new BSN program in Springfield?

AROUND THE STATE

University and the University of Michigan. It was hosted in partnership with Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, where the program originated.

The 12 BSN students were placed on interdisciplinary teams, comprised of students representing medicine, physician’s assistants, social work, business, pharmacy and nursing.

Van Schyndel, who teaches population health, said that the students were focused on the social determinants of health that cause patients to be frequent users of the hospital and emergency room. This included things like making sure the patients took their medicine as prescribed, went to their doctor’s appointments, and ate a healthy diet. Van Schyndel said one student taught a patient how to cook eggs, while another got her patient to join the local YMCA. She said she saw growth in the students’ abilities to work on teams with other healthcare professionals.

The program will continue for the 2018-19 school year with six students signed up, Van Schyndel said.

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The 2018 cadre of students in the hotspotting program includes: Nicole Borjon, Adrian Torres, Darlene Steinkamp, Brooke Ginglen, Bridget Boateng and Arlene Castro. Also pictured: coach Jennie Van Schyndel.

URBANA

About 60 people attended an alumni and student reception in Urbana on March 9, 2018, an evening that featured student poster presentations, tours of the college’s simulation lab and classrooms and a talk by clinical associate professor Janet Thorlton, PhD ’10 , MS ’04, RN, CNE.

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NurseFirst

No matter where their careers take them, many nursing leaders consider themselves a nurse first.

Lorna Finnegan, PhD ’03, MS ’88, BSN ’80, RN, FAAN, UIC Nursing’s executive associate dean and associate professor, shares one of her early memories as a nurse.

When I decided to open a clinic for the first time, I found myself operating it out of a closet.

It was 1993 and I was a fairly new family nurse practitioner and director of the FNP program at St. Xavier University in Chicago.

The principal at a Chicago public school, Gladstone Elementary School, now UIC College Prep, happened to hear about the role of FNPs at a panel presentation.

He was facing a major challenge: A high percentage of his students were being excluded from school because they didn’t have the required immunizations or school physicals. He asked if our program wanted to partner with him.

We began writing grants for funding, but we needed to solve the immediate problem of getting students immunized so they could stay in school. The students and their families faced many barriers to accessing care.

We found an old exam table and put it in a large storage closet at the school, using it like an exam room.

It was a space for us to start seeing students, conducting physical

exams and getting them up to speed with their immunizations.

When we were funded with grants from the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Illinois Department of Public Health to start a school-based health center, we were able to do a complete renovation with three exam rooms.

It was not only a clinic that served the students in the school, but it was a clinic that served the community.

We used community health workers who connected us with families and helped us obtain consents from parents so that we could see their children in the clinic.

When we started, 241 students were in jeopardy of being excluded from school due to lack of immunizations and school physicals.

As a result of our efforts, all eligible students received immunizations and physicals and were able to remain in school.

The grant was for five years, but the clinic lasted well beyond that, eventually becoming part of a federally qualified health center.

What’s your most memorable early experience as a nurse? Share it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #UICnursefirst or email us at conalum@uic.edu.

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College of Nursing

Take the road best traveled The DNP at UIC • Ranked #12 in the nation (U.S. News & World Report)

• World-renowned excellence in 12 specialty areas, with post-master’s non-specialty option also available • Flexible format: hybrid of online and on-site courses

SANDRA MARTELL UIC DNP ’10 Public Health Administrator Winnebago County Health Department Rockford, Illinois

• Highly-desirable clinical placements arranged for you • 99% of graduates pass certification exams on first attempt • #1 among Illinois nursing schools for NIH research funding Learn more at go.uic.edu/DNP-VS

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The Diverse Paths of Nursing Visit our new website! • nursing.uic.edu

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