Thoughts From The Interim Dean Linda Sarna (2016 Edition)
Nursing education is serious business and the stakes are high. It has been my honor and privilege to support and enable the team approach at the UCLA School of Nursing. I have been inspired by the wisdom, the creativity, the serious thought, and the incredible efforts that our faculty and staff, as well as our students, put forward to create and ensure an outstanding nursing program. Teamwork isn’t always easy, and we don’t always agree. Debate is a strong academic tradition and part of the teamwork process. In the end I am convinced that our vigorous and thoughtful discussions where everyone can participate, results in the best product for nursing education, for nursing research, and for nursing practice. It is one of the reasons we are in the Top 5 percent of nursing schools and #5 in NIH funding.
Our process also includes the involvement and contributions of many from our UCLA Health Sciences professional schools, the health system itself, and from our clinical partners and community agencies. These include nursing leaders and staff, physicians, and other healthcare providers who collaborate to provide our students with the best possible education and who do their best to facilitate our research efforts. The ultimate goal for these efforts is to advance the health of our communities and quality of care.
We are very excited about the growing collaboration with our nursing colleagues at the UCLA Health System. Pairing research expertise with real world challenges in caring for patients is stimulating for our faculty and for our students. And, being at UCLA, one of the top research universities in the world, provides our faculty and students with unparalleled opportunities to work alongside top scientists both in and outside of the School. For example, this year, we are co-sponsoring a two-day Nursing Research Conference “Becoming Agents of Change: Inspiring Inquiry and Innovation for Excellence in Patient Care.” This will be held September 20 and 21 at the new Luskin Conference Center. Several of our faculty will be presenting on their areas of expertise including simulation, interprofessional education, grant development and statistics.
We recognize that effective communication and teamwork among healthcare providers is tightly linked to patient safety and improved patient outcomes. In an interprofessional course, along with medical students from the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) and students from UCLA Dentistry, our acute care nurse practitioner students are discus
sing real world healthcare challenges and how they can work together to improve patient outcomes. Their exciting work, and the tools that were created as part of an interprofessional educational project with our physician colleagues, are presented in our cover story “Interprofessional Education: teaching the concept; measuring the results."
In another example of interprofessional education, we will be collaborating with faculty from the DGSOM and the Fielding School of Public Health in the new National Clinician Scholars Program, scheduled to launch this July. Growing out of the RWJF Clinical Scholars program, (which was only for physicians), nurses will join with physicians to work together to cultivate health equity, eliminate health disparities and invent new models of care. In Southern California, our community partners include the VA of Greater Los Angeles, LA County Department of Health Services, Kaiser Permanente Southern California, Charles Drew University, Venice Family Clinic and the newly reopened MLK Community Hospital among others. Working together, we believe real change can be made.
Teams need leaders. I am proud that the School of Nursing has been turning out nursing leaders who are part of and leading healthcare teams for nearly 67 years. At its inception, the founding Dean, Lulu Wolf Hassenplug, envisioned a school with nursing students broadly educated in a university setting so that they could provide professional leadership, not just take orders. The many graduates from the UCLA School of Nursing are doing just that by improving health care and nursing education in communities in Los Angeles and across the country.