faculty providing health care to community
The Yale School of Nursing (YSN) is expanding the ways that it delivers quality health care to individuals and families with the creation of the YSN Office of Clinical Affairs.
The new office will support the existing clinical practice activities of YSN faculty, and will use the existing network of services as a foundation for an innovative model of health care delivery that will meet the diverse needs of the community. Betty Nelson, who joined YSN in the fall of 2002 as the inaugural associate dean of clinical affairs, will direct the new initiative.
According to Nelson, YSN already has a distinguished history of providing direct health care services to the community. Approximately 42% of current YSN faculty have a joint appointment at the school and spend a considerable amount of their time in clinical settings.
"Such high numbers of faculty who provide direct patient care are not the norm among nursing education institutions," says Nelson, "especially those institutions that have developed as extensive and productive a research base as Yale."
The Office of Clinical Affairs will seek both to expand the involvement of YSN faculty in clinical practice and to strengthen the links between the faculty's clinical practice activities, their advanced practice education and their scholarship. "The overall objective is to create a mechanism to support faculty who are providing direct patient care in addition to their teaching responsibilities, and to leverage their extensive experiences into the development of new knowledge," says Nelson.
A number of faculty practice activities are already in place, notes Nelson, including the Yale Women's Health and Midwifery practice in Derby, Connecticut, which -- with its partner, Valley Women's Health Access Program -- was recognized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this October as one of 12 National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health. (See related story.)
The new YSN office, says Nelson, will work to develop a variety of training models based on the current clinical practice activities that support faculty scholarship, provide hands-on training for YSN students, and improve the health of individuals and families in our community.
Expanding YSN's clinical practice activities will help to streamline education, practice and scholarship, and to focus the school's extensive resources on the emerging needs of the community, says Nelson. She describes this process as the "development of a continuous loop" where field data gathered by YSN faculty and students will inform faculty scholarship, which will in turn augment the knowledge that will be used to educate tomorrow's nursing leaders to effectively meet the diverse and changing needs of patients.
"The creation of the YSN Office of Clinical Affairs is very much mission-driven," says Nelson. "In expanding the opportunities for YSN faculty to provide direct patient care, YSN continues to improve health care for all people."
Before coming to Yale, Nelson was the founding director of the Research Center of the American College of Physicians where she was responsible for a broad scope of primary, secondary and policy research, as well as for conducting an annual assessment of the health care environment.
Her career has spanned clinical practice (pediatrics), education, administration, policy and research, and she has held leadership positions at hospitals and nursing associations throughout the country. She is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow (2001-2004).
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