Leadership in Action: Alumni, Faculty, Staff and Student Milestones
Three Nursing Leaders Retire in June
After a combined 88 years of teaching, three of the School’s most respected professors, Barbara Burgel, Carmen Portillo and JoAnne Saxe, retired at the end of June. All three are fellows of the American Academy of Nursing.
Burgel – who is also a fellow of the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses – has taught occupational and environmental health nursing and adult-gerontology primary care nursing since 1981; she served as director of the UCSF Adult Nurse Practitioner (ANP) Program from 1988 to 1994, and as vice chair of the Department of Community Health Systems from 1995 to 2000. Burgel’s research focus has been on occupational health among low-wage workers, and she was a co-primary investigator of the UCSF Community Occupational Health Project, which delivered clinical care, education and advocacy to low-wage workers.
Portillo – professor and chair of Community Health Systems – has spent a career working on a diverse but related set of issues, including treatment adherence and stigma among people with HIV/AIDS, women’s health, symptom management, quality of life and health disparities in vulnerable and high-risk populations.
She has served on the UCSF Clinical & Translational Science Institute’s Community Engagement & Health Policy Program, as an executive board member for the UCSF AIDS Research Institute and as a leader of the International Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Clinical Training in Nursing. Portillo was instrumental in developing the doctoral training curriculum at UCSF, and has directed the School’s HIV/AIDS Minor for almost 25 years.
An advocate for expanding opportunities for Hispanic nurses, Portillo has consulted with other schools of nursing nationwide on recruitment and development, and helped establish the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurse Associations, which represents five ethnic minority nursing associations.
Saxe – health sciences clinical professor and director emerita of the Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner (AGPCNP) program – has spent 32 years as a health professions educator. She has been instrumental in leading nursing curricula reforms that have linked classroom education to learning in health care and health policy settings and has been an innovator of practice models, such as telehealth and interprofessional, patient-centered medical homes, that focus on vulnerable populations.
She helped develop the interprofessional educational and care-delivery model at San Francisco’s acclaimed VA Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education, and has been an advocate for health care for vulnerable populations in her work with the SF Community Clinic Consortium and with the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. In addition, she has served as an advocate for educational and practice improvements as a leader and consultant to professional educational organizations and nursing schools worldwide.
Julene Johnson Named Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America
Julene Johnson The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) has named Julene Johnson, professor and associate director at the UCSF School of Nursing’s Institute for Health & Aging, a fellow, the highest class of membership within the society.
GSA fellows are selected in recognition of their outstanding and continuing work in gerontology. Johnson, who joins 71 other clinicians and researchers on this year’s fellowship list, is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on aspects of cognitive aging, such as mild cognitive impairment’s relationship with dementia and functional decline.
Her innovative approach to promoting the well-being of older adults has included the development of cost-effective community-based programs such as Community of Voices, a community choir program she has pioneered in both San Francisco and Finland. The program encompassed a National Institutes of Health-funded collaborative study designed to demonstrate if and how community arts programs could be used to promote health.
Diane Tober and Monica McLemore on Medication Abortion at Reproductive Health Seminar
Diane Tober (left) and Monica McLemore Medical anthropologist and Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Health & Aging Diane Tober and Assistant Professor of Family Health Care Nursing Monica McLemore were key speakers at a June 8 seminar on medication abortion. Both are researchers who focus on aspects of reproductive health and justice.
The seminar, hosted by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), engaged reproductive health experts and advocates in a multifaceted discussion of the history of medication abortion, access policy and the expansion of advanced practice nurses’ ability to provide it.
Elena Flowers Featured in CBS Story on Genetic Testing
Elena Flowers Assistant Professor of Physiological Nursing Elena Flowers, whose journey into personal genomics has been chronicled at Science of Caring, was featured alongside her two daughters in a CBS-affiliate KPIX-TV story on so-called “do-it-yourself” genetic testing.
The story highlighted Flowers’ foray into genomic sequencing, which can be performed by specialized commercial laboratories from a simple blood sample. Flowers, a genomics researcher who examines molecular markers for cardiovascular disease risk and teaches genomics to advanced practice nursing students, has had her own genome sequenced as part of a research project looking at the ramifications of DIY genomic testing.
Through the project, Flowers hopes to help clinicians better understand and guide patients through the questions and challenges that crop up with genetic test results that are only beginning to be understood in terms of their meaning for health.
Charlene Harrington Looks at Trends in For-Profit Nursing Homes
Charlene Harrington The June 8 issue of open-access journal Health Services Insights features a study of trends in for-profit nursing home chains by Professor Emerita of Social and Behavioral Sciences Charlene Harrington.
In the study, Harrington and her colleagues examine corporate strategies, costs and quality in for-profit nursing home chains across Canada, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. They found several trends, including the fact that for-profit chains are often owned by private equity investors and that they tend to have many ownership changes over time. The authors note that these factors have a potential impact on the quality of care for-profit nursing homes deliver, and that the marketization of nursing home care presents challenges for governments trying to collect information on costs and quality.
Maureen Sheehan Wins Helen Martin Precepting Award
Maureen Sheehan Maureen Sheehan, a nurse practitioner in pediatric neurology at Stanford Children’s Health, was honored as this year’s recipient of the Helen Martin Award for Excellence in Clinical Precepting. The May 31 celebration had an audience that included Interim Dean Sandra Weiss, the late Helen Martin’s husband, Seth Ammerman, Martin’s family and friends, and faculty and students from the School of Nursing.
Sheehan, who was selected from among a group of student-nominated volunteer clinical preceptors, accepted the award via video, telling attendees that precepting was her way of honoring those who taught her as a master’s-entry program student at the School.
The award was established in honor of Helen Martin (MS ’91), a beloved mentor and preceptor who served as clinical director of Valencia Health Services; it recognizes the essential work that preceptors do to train future clinicians.
New Website Launches to Support Parents of Premature Babies
Linda Franck and Elizabeth Rogers (left) with TinyLife – Life at Home team members May 25, 2017, marked the launch of a new website, TinyLife – Life at Home, aimed at supporting parents bringing premature babies home from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Professor of Family Health Care Nursing Linda Franck and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital neonatologist Elizabeth Rogers were part of the UCSF team that helped develop the site in collaboration with researchers from the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation and the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Queen’s University Belfast. The project was funded by a grant from TinyLife, an organization dedicated to reducing premature birth, illness, disability and death among babies born in Northern Ireland.
Researchers worked with parents of premature babies to develop the site, which offers practical advice and resources from both parents and clinicians to help parents with the sometimes difficult transition from NICU to home.
Valerie Yerger Talks Tobacco Control on Tom Joyner’s “Get Well Wednesday”
Valerie Yerger Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and tobacco control researcher Valerie Yerger was a guest on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show’s “Get Well Wednesday” radio segment on June 14.
Yerger, who is on the faculty of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, spoke about tobacco use in the African American community and the reasons for the slower decline in smoking among African Americans. She highlighted her research into the marketing of tobacco products to the African American community and the problem of menthol cigarette use, which, she noted, has been a key element in tobacco companies’ efforts to entice young people to smoke and to keep people smoking.
Faculty, Alumni and Students Present at the American College of Nurse-Midwives
Faculty, students and alumni from the School’s Certified Nurse-Midwife/Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner program were a significant presence at the 62nd annual meeting of the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), held in Chicago in May.
Susan Leibel and Rosemary Mann, who founded the San Francisco General Hospital midwifery service over 40 years ago, received the Dorothea M. Lang Pioneer Award for their visionary leadership and contributions to midwifery.
Ana Delgado receives the preceptor award. Faculty members Rebekah Kaplan and Ana Delgado received awards for teaching and precepting, respectively, and alumna Jyesha Wren Serbin (MS ’15) won the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health Mary Ann Shah New Author Award for her paper “The Impact of Racism and Midwifery’s Lack of Racial Diversity: A Literature Review.”
At the educators’ workshop, Cynthia Belew and Kim Dau, with the University of New Mexico’s Felina Ortiz, delivered a keynote presentation on creating inclusive spaces in classrooms and clinical experiences for students of color. Belew, Ortiz and Wren Serbin, with alumna Elizabeth Donnelly (MS ’15), also presented on using structural competency to address racism in clinical care.
Other faculty presentations included Deborah Anderson on supporting academic tenacity – working hard and working smart for a long period of time – in midwifery students, using the growth mind-set and belonging models, and Belew on functional medicine as a new paradigm for women’s health.
In addition, the 400-plus attendees of the ACNM business meeting passed a motion, introduced by Donnelly, to institutionalize at every ACNM annual meeting an educational track that addresses racism and health disparities. Delgado, Wren Serbin and current midwifery student Darcy Stanley also spoke in favor of the motion.
Former Dean David Vlahov Responds to New York Times Essay on Male Nurses
David Vlahov In response to a June 24 essay in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times titled “Men Don't Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree,” former Dean David Vlahov penned a passionate and personal defense of men in nursing. The New York Times published the response on Sunday, July 2.
