Nursing News: A Catalog of Accomplishment

Creating a Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science

UC San Francisco has been awarded $20 million from the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration to establish a Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science. The center, under the leadership of Stan Glantz, includes faculty from all four schools. Wendy Max and Hai-Yen Sung of the School of Nursing will be developing economic models to estimate health care costs resulting from the use of different tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes, moist snuff, chewing tobacco and cigars. These models will be used to evaluate the impact of potential FDA regulations on health care costs. Janine Cataldo of the School will study risk and benefit perceptions related to both conventional and new emerging tobacco products among older smokers. She will analyze the extent to which these perceptions are related to older smokers’ exposure to advertising, especially ads that promote new products as a way to respond to smoke-free environments.

Forging Advances in Geriatric Nursing, Mental Health and HIV/AIDS

In the last few weeks, numerous publications and government funders have recognized work being done by faculty members from UC San Francisco School of Nursing’s Community Health Systems department.

Laura Wagner’s article “Impact of Voluntary Accreditation on Short-Stay Rehabilitative Measures in U.S. Nursing Homes” has been selected for the 2013 Editor’s Choice Award by Rehabilitation Nursing, the official journal of the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses. Another Wagner article, “Use of HIT for Adverse Event Reporting in Nursing Homes: Barriers and Facilitators,” originally published in the journal Geriatric Nursing, will be highlighted in the November 2013 issue of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s monthly newsletter, Research Activities.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has funded three Community Health Systems faculty projects that aim to increase access to health care for some of the country’s most vulnerable populations:

• JoAnne Saxe and Suzan Stringari-Murray received a three-year Advanced Nursing Education grant for an interprofessional education project to improve the workforce capacity for the care of adults across the life span.
• Gerri Collins-Bride, Linda Chafetz and Barbara Burgel will use a three-year Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention grant to create an interprofessional collaborative model for integrating primary and behavioral health care. They hope the project, which will take place in the Department of Community Health Systems’ Primary Care Outreach for the Mentally Ill (PCOM) faculty practice, can be replicated across the country.
• Carmen Portillo, Suzan Stringari-Murray and Carol Dawson Rose received a five-year grant from the HRSA HIV/AIDS Bureau’s AIDS Education and Training Centers program for a project to increase the number of primary care nurse practitioner students trained to provide care for people with HIV/AIDS.

Two interdisciplinary teams from across UC San Francisco have received Interprofessional Instructional Improvement grants from the UCSF Library and the Center for Innovation in Interprofessional Education:

• The School of Nursing’s Hattie Grundland and Lynda Mackin are directing a project titled “Crossing the Interprofessional Precepting Chasm: Meeting the Current and Future Needs of Clinical Preceptors,” in collaboration with faculty members JoAnne Saxe, Peter Ambrose (School of Pharmacy) and Meg McNamara and Bridget O’Brien (both from the School of Medicine).
• JoAnne Saxe and Kirsten Balano (School of Pharmacy) are leading “Deepening Counseling for Behavior Change Skills Through Interprofessional Team-Based Learning” with faculty members Tina Brock (School of Pharmacy) and Maria Wamsley (School of Medicine).

Looking at Opportunities and Barriers in Mental Health Nursing

Susan Chapman, director of UC San Francisco School of Nursing’s Health Policy Nursing master’s specialty, and Bethany Phoenix, coordinator of the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing master’s specialty, have received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) Future of Nursing National Research Agenda to examine opportunities and barriers that affect psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioners’ ability to effectively use their skills and expertise in public mental health settings.

According to the accompanying press release, RWJF’s Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) coordinates the project. INQRI, the release notes, “supports interdisciplinary teams of nurse scholars and scholars from other disciplines to address the gaps in knowledge about the relationship between nursing and health care quality.”