CCNA in the News

Healthwatch, The Hill’s daily health care blog, recently covered CCNA’s work with twelve states that have successfully launched state-level partnerships to address the nursing shortage. The Center to Champion Nursing in America (CCNA) is helping 31 states build multi-stakeholder collaborations that are redesigning nursing education, implementing policy change, and addressing faculty recruitment and diversity.

On Friday, July 10, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the appointment of a committee to review and update the criteria used to define medically underserved areas and health professional shortage areas. The committee was formed as part of the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Susan Reinhard, PhD, RN, FAAN, CCNA’s chief strategist and AARP senior vice president and director of the AARP Public Policy Institute, has been appointed to the National Advisory Council for Nursing Research (NACNR) by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.  NACNR is the principal advisory board for the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). Dr.

The Center to Champion Nursing in America is seeking high quality, original photos that accurately portray 21st century nursing. The goal is to create a repository of photos of nurses across all health care settings in professional practice and leadership roles, as well as in recruitment and retention activities, and nursing education.

One winning photograph will be featured in an AARP print and/or web publication. All qualified photos will make up CCNA’s new public repository of images.

In collaboration with the Center to Champion Nursing in America, the American Journal of Nursing has developed a seven-part series on nursing education capacity: Uniting States, Sharing Strategies. Just released, the third article offers a deeper look at successful strategies for expanding education capacity, focusing this time on the unprecedented lead taken by Oregon.

In an article detailing the challenge faced by our nation’s nursing programs to graduate nurses, CCNA Director Brenda Cleary discusses the impact of the economic downturn on the nursing job market and the need to address the root causes of the faculty shortage. The good news, according to CCNA’s Senior Legislative Representative Winifred Quinn, is that health reform proposals being considered by Congress include ways to increase education capacity.

In an examination of Federal funding for nursing education, CCNA Senior Legislative Representative Winifred Quinn discusses the critical function of these funds, saying “preparing more nurses is a key way to ensure that the nation has the highly skilled nursing workforce it needs to meet Americans’ health care needs. More money is also needed to help curb the looming nursing shortage, which threatens to undermine the quality of patient care.”

The Center to Champion Nursing in America has selected Andrea Brassard as its new senior strategic policy advisor. Dr. Brassard comes to the Center from George Washington University where she coordinated the adult nurse practitioner program and worked on the RWJF-funded Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative.  She is president-elect of the Nurse Practitioner Association of the District of Columbia and past chair of the Center for Nursing Advocacy. She served as a public policy fellow during her doctoral work at Columbia University.

In the November 2, 2009 edition of Community College Week, educators and administrators from two-year colleges around the country read an opinion editorial about the relationship between education and the nursing shortage called “Closing the Nursing Shortage Demands Creativity, Collaboration.”

The growing shortage of nurses in the U.S. is well documented, and as a recent item in the New York Times reminds us, there is also a crisis in the number of family and general practice physicians—there could be 40,000 too few by 2020, even without health care reform. Meantime, nurse practitioners (NPs), nurses with advanced degrees who can perform a host of primary care services that physicians perform, are willing and able to fill the gap.