R e t u r n   t o   t a b l e   o f   c o n t e n t s

 

N e w s  B r i e f s


Dr. Maureen Kelley is the first nurse midwife to practice at Emory Crawford Long Hospital.

 

Voice of Experience
Kelley leads family and community nursing

In the two decades that Dr. Maureen Kelley has taught and practiced nursing midwifery at Emory, she has thrived on being part of an academic health center, where nursing education and practice intersect. Now she is broadening her perspective on both fronts as the newly appointed chair of the Department of Family and Community Nursing.

“Maureen is a talented nurse and scholar who brings boundless energy and wisdom to this leadership position,” says Dean Marla Salmon.

Kelley has been part of the School of Nursing since 1980 and in 1983 became the first nurse midwife at Emory Crawford Long Hospital, where she still practices.

At the start of her career, Kelley was a staff nurse in the NICU at the University of Minnesota Hospital but opted to attend graduate school to learn more about obstetrics. Her graduate school adviser in California pointed her toward nurse midwifery. “I fell in love with it,” says Kelley, an associate professor (clinical). “You’re doing what nursing truly is meant to do. It’s a gift to be with a family giving birth.”

Today, Kelley shares her knowledge and passion for her specialty as director of the Nurse-Midwifery Education Program at Emory. She is a consultant to The Carter Center’s Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative, led by Dr. Joyce Murray, professor of nursing. This summer, Kelley will travel to Russia with an international team to develop prenatal and maternal care guidelines at a district hospital outside of Moscow. She has held several positions with the American College of Midwives and is one of the first School of Nursing participants in Emory’s Woodruff Leadership Academy.

As for her department, Kelley is collaborating with faculty on several initiatives to strengthen research, international nursing, and public health leadership. The department also hopes to expand preparation of family-nurse midwives in mental health and substance abuse and offer a pediatric critical care specialty to meet the growing need for this type of care. She is likewise enthusiastic about integrating faculty who work with the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing into the department. “This is a wonderful opportunity to broaden our concept of community and learn more about international health issues,” she says.

Kelley has one other goal in mind, albeit a fleeting one. “If we could arrange for babies to be born between 8 AM and 8 PM, things would be perfect.”

Understanding the Heart

Schumacher honored for cardiac research


Dr. Autumn Schumacher, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Nursing, is bridging the gap between nursing and biomedical engineering through research. That’s why she was named the 2002 Hyundai Motor America/American Nurses Foundation Scholar. Coupled with support from the National Institute of Nursing Research, the award supports her study of the nonlinear characteristics of ventricular fibrillation.

Schumacher is collaborating with Dr. Sandra Dunbar, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Cardiovascular Nursing, and researchers in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Bioengineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. Working in a Georgia Tech laboratory, Schumacher will study ventricular fibrillation in an isolated rabbit heart while using various drugs to simulate autonomic nervous system imbalance. To capture the data, she will photograph fluorescent images of the heart’s electrical activity at 1,000 frames per second while recording the heart’s rhythm via electrocardiogram. Then she will examine the data using nonlinear mathematics, an engineering method for analyzing electrical signals that has not been widely used in physiology studies.

“Once we understand the physiological process of ventricular fibrillation,” says Schumacher, “then we can develop better technology to monitor and terminate this deadly rhythm in heart patients.”

Eventually, Schumacher’s research could have implications for researchers like Dunbar, who is studying depression in patients with internal defibrillation devices. It also may shed light on why defibrillation works to return the heart to normal sinus rhythm.

The mission, the quality of the students and faculty, Marla Salmon’s leadership as dean, and the fact that the school has accomplished so much intrigued me.

—Kathleen Egan
Director of Development

New Directions
Egan named director of development

Improving the well-being of others has been a guiding force throughout Kathleen Egan’s fund-raising career. Now Egan is adding another dimension to that as director of development for the School of Nursing.

Last fall, when Egan first learned about the position, she knew the school was the right place to be. “The mission, the quality of the students and faculty, Marla Salmon’s leadership as dean, and the fact that the school has accomplished so much intrigued me,” says Egan. “The notion of developing nurse leaders and nurse scholars, along with what the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing is doing, was compelling.”

Egan has worked in the nonprofit sector and community affairs in Atlanta for more than 20 years. She has directed fund-raising programs for a local arts organization and for parks and cultural initiatives with the city. Prior to joining Emory, Egan directed development efforts in the Southeast for the Trust for Public Land, which conserves land to protect cultural and natural resources in US communities. For 11 years, she served as executive director for UNICEF Atlanta, which operates education, advocacy, and fund-raising programs in nine southeastern states. During that time, UNICEF Atlanta and the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games formed Olympic Aid Atlanta. Together, the partners raised more than $12 million to assist 18 million children affected by war in 14 nations. Through these efforts, UNICEF helped broker cease-fires in Afghanistan, northern Iraq, and Sri Lanka to allow for mass immunization of children.

Egan traveled to Rwanda for an Olympic Aid mission and to the Dominican Republic and El Salvador on behalf of UNICEF. While in El Salvador, Egan was part of a delegation that met with community health workers, grassroots organizations, and political leaders in the aftermath of the nation’s 12-year civil war.

“The health of children was a galvanizing point for both sides of the conflict,” Egan recalls. “At the height of the conflict, 90% of the nation’s children were immunized on 18 separate days when both sides put down their arms.”

Given her experiences, Egan naturally was drawn to the School of Nursing’s mission of educating nurses to improve health at home and abroad. “The school has a lot of connection points for people who have a special interest in supporting our school,” says Egan. “Among other things, we want to provide more scholarship funds so that we continue to attract talented students to the school. There’s a lot for alumni and others to be excited about, and I’m eager to help them find ways to begin or continue their relationships with the school.”

An Evening to Remember
School honors nurse-midwives

When the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNW) came to Atlanta last year for its annual conference, the School of Nursing used the occasion to honor its own. The nursing school held a reception for Associate Professor (Clinical) Jane Mashburn, 78MN, (second from left) upon being named a fellow of the ACNW, along with Barbara Graves, 86MN (not pictured). Also honored that night was Emily Young-Johnson, 98N, (far right) as the recipient of the first Elizabeth Sharp Scholarship, specifically for a nurse-midwifery student who is enrolled in the MSN/MPH program. The scholarship is named for the emerita professor who held joint appointments in medicine, nursing, and public health, and who greatly influenced students from each discipline regarding gynecology and obstetrics. Sharp (far left) was responsible for establishing the dual-degree master's program in nursing and public health. Also pictured is Dr. Maureen Kelley (second from right), chair of the Department of Family and Community Nursing.

top

(Top photo) Katherine Kite (L–R), Minette Coetzee, Pat Riley, and Pamela McQuide are members of an Emory/CDC team collaborating with nursing leaders and educators in Kenya to assess its nursing workforce. (Bottom Photo) Kenyan nursing leaders and LCCIN staff are working to centralize paper records (some of which are shown in this photo) on a computer database. Grace Kongoro (left) plays a key role as in-country coordinator for the workforce analysis project. She is pictured with McQuide and other Nursing Council of Kenya members.

Building Capacity Together
Team assesses Kenya's nursing workforce

Attending two funerals a week for nurses who have died of AIDS is a routine occurrence for the director of nursing at a large hospital in Kenya.

The risk for nurses there is grave. More than half of all people hospitalized in Kenya are HIV positive, and most are very sick. Nurses and nursing students care for them daily, often without adequate protection. The lack of basic supplies to protect themselves—rubber gloves, soap, and water—is only part of the problem. Denial about the disease, also widespread in the general population, seems to prevent nurses from protecting themselves and giving the best care to their patients.

“In some ways, it is difficult to understand what these nurses face and the decisions they make,” says Dr. Pamela McQuide, a postdoctoral fellow with the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing (LCCIN). McQuide and her colleagues are working to build nurses’ capacity by partnering with experts in Kenya to assess its nursing workforce. Collaborators include the LCCIN and nursing leaders and educators in Kenya, supported by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Last June, an LCCIN team traveled to Kenya to evaluate a request to design a new baccalaureate nursing program at Kenyatta University. Led by Kathryn Kite, administrative director of the LCCIN, the team included McQuide, who has operations research experience in maternal and child health in Kenya; Dr. Minette Coetzee, an Emory postdoctoral fellow who is a nurse educator and curriculum consultant from South Africa; and Patricia Riley, a certified nurse midwife with the CDC and an adjunct faculty member in the School of Nursing.

A database ... will empower nurses to make changes at the policy level, giving them the right to safer working conditions and a way to advance ... instead of leaving the country.

—Dr. Pamela McQuide
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing

Instead of starting another baccalaureate program, the LCCIN team recommended conducting an analysis to evaluate the nation’s nursing workforce and training capacity. In turn, this analysis will influence national health policy and planning of nursing programs while building capacity in Kenya’s nursing community. Now under way, the first task is to build an electronic database to centralize paper records on the numbers of nurses trained, registered, and who have migrated out of the country. These records are housed with various parts of the Nursing Council of Kenya.

“Kenya’s nursing leaders need good computerized data to make informed decisions, to determine how many nurses there are, how many are leaving, and how many are dying of AIDS,” says McQuide, the principal investigator for the project. “They also need to know where positions are open, where there are gaps in supplying nurses or training, and if nurses are being trained to meet the country’s community-based needs. A database with this information will empower nurses so that changes can be made at a policy level, giving them the right to safer working conditions and a way to advance in Kenya instead of leaving the country.”

Many involved in nursing care in Kenya have become stakeholders in the project. They include the Ministry of Health, the Nursing Council of Kenya, the National Nurses Association of Kenya, and organizations from the private and missionary sectors that employ and train nurses. Constituents are represented on a steering committee that works with the LCCIN to direct the project.

“We owe so much to the groundwork laid by Grace Kongoro as our in-country coordinator,” says McQuide. A leader with the Nursing Council of Kenya, Kongoro has a broad perspective on the role of nurses and a thorough understanding of existing structures, protocols, and procedures in her country.

“The Kenyan government is investing staff and resources,” adds McQuide. “They also are setting aside money for a national plan to treat health care workers with AIDS. They have bought computers and are in the process of establishing a national health database, with the plan of linking all data on nurses and nursing.”

The LCCIN project will continue through 2004. Before then, the team will share its findings at regional forum. A final report will provide details on the workforce evaluation and will document the collaboration and consensus-building process within Kenya. The team is confident that this model will prove successful and will be adopted in other countries seeking to strengthen their nursing workforce and training capacity.—Carol Pinto

Life Lessons in Caring and Learning

Professor Emerita Leah Gorman dies

The words “caring” and “learning” stand out in Dr. Lynda Nauright’s mind whenever she thinks of Dr. Leah Gorman. A professor emerita in the School of Nursing, Gorman died of cancer at Emory University Hospital on February 22. She was 76.

“Leah exemplified caring,” says Nauright, professor of nursing in the Department of Adult and Elder Health. “She knew, as we all should, that the only way to teach students to care for others is to care for them. And she did. Her students loved her, and she loved them.”

“I was a colleague of Leah’s on the faculty at the School of Nursing, but I always felt like one of her students,” Nauright continues. “She never set out to teach me anything, but I never had a conversation with Leah that I didn’t learn something.”

Gorman came to Emory in 1980, when she joined the School of Nursing to coordinate its graduate education and research programs. Widely respected as a leader in psychiatric nursing, Gorman previously was chief nurse with the National Institute of Mental Health and a nursing faculty member at other universities.

“She was a master teacher and philosopher,” recalls Nauright. “She really made us look a lot closer at nursing theory and philosophy and our own teaching philosophy.”

Gorman served as a military nurse during World War II and earned her doctorate at Columbia University. At Emory, she introduced nursing students to Rogerian theory. This theory bears the name of nurse and physicist Martha Rogers, who believed that the type of care people receive affects their energy.

As Nauright explains, “Leah would not wish us to say she has died. As a Rogerian scholar, she would say she has evolved into an energy field pattern beyond waking.”

Full of spunk and energy, Gorman loved to read, play the harmonica, and travel. Although Gorman underwent a double hip replacement after retiring from Emory in 1997, she did not let it stop her from leading a group of nurses on a research trip to South Africa. She prepared for the trip by working out in the gym for weeks, says Nauright. In late 2001, Gorman underwent heart bypass surgery and participated in Emory’s HeartWise program during her recovery.

Nauright was among those who spoke at Gorman’s memorial service in Atlanta and called on those present to remember their friend and colleague this way: “As long as we, her students all, are open to new ideas, as long as we care, as long as we continue to learn, she will be with us.”

Memorial gifts for Dr. Leah Gorman may be sent to the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, 1520 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30322.

Dr. Joyce Murray

Murray leads initiative for health educators in Ethiopia

Dr. Joyce Murray has assumed one her most challenging and exciting roles to date. She is now director of The Carter Center’s Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative (EPHTI), which seeks to improve community health education in a nation where disease is prevalent and resources are scarce.

Murray succeeds Dr. Dennis Carlson, who is reducing his role with the initiative he began six years ago. She will continue teaching as she divides her time between the School of Nursing, where she serves as professor in the Department of Adult and Elder Health, and The Carter Center, whose programs promote peace and health worldwide.

A consultant to the EPHTI for three years, Murray has worked extensively with Ethiopian health sciences faculty to develop training modules, lecture notes, and manuals for educating community health workers. She also has led annual workshops to assist educators in developing standardized teaching methods and curricula to educate students. With 500 new health centers opening across Ethiopia in the next decade, the EPHTI is critical to laying the groundwork for training the staff who will operate them.

Under Murray’s leadership, the EPHTI will continue to work with the Ethiopian government to create and implement new education programs and strengthen the nation’s capacity to improve health care long after the initiative ends.—Jane Devilbiss



Drs. Jeremy Boss and Susan Eckert
wrote their bookto guide young scientists
along the road to promotion and tenure.

Collaboration at Work
Co-authors advise aspiring researchers

"So you want to be an academic scientist. Great choice.” Thus begins a humor-laden book full of practical advice for aspiring researchers, co-written by Dr. Susan Eckert, associate dean for finance and research administration in the School of Nursing, and Dr. Jeremy Boss, professor of microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine. As the introduction notes, Academic Scientists at Work: Navigating the Biomedical Research Career (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003) guides readers along the academic path to promotion and tenure.

The authors came up with the idea for the book five or six years ago when Eckert was the administrator for the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the medical school. By the time she joined the School of Nursing as assistant dean in 2001, she was a 20-year veteran of the microbiology department, where she saw Boss work hard to succeed as a teacher and scientist. The book sprang from their concern for aspiring scientists who sometimes fail to achieve tenure. Eckert and Boss realized that a book might help young faculty learn how to thrive in a complex academic environment.

“New assistant professors often get generous start-up packages but lack the skills to manage their finances and staff their labs,” explains Eckert. “They need to learn how to build a budget, negotiate the best deal with lab equipment vendors to make their money last, how to write grants and how to accept criticism when writing them, and how to be a good faculty citizen.”

Boss decided early on to take a humorous approach, which gave rise to several colorful book characters, including Dr. Ima Starr and the graduate student with the curly red hair. “The humor offsets the seriousness of the subject matter and hopefully will keep the reader’s attention,” says Boss, whose own studies focus on the molecular mechanisms that regulate immune system genes. “No one likes to read a list of guidelines on how to do something. Anyway, I can’t resist a chance to make people laugh.”

Although geared toward biomedical scientists with large laboratories, the book has useful applications for researchers in other fields. “School of Nursing faculty with research grants often employ people to assist them,” says Eckert. “The book covers a lot of topics that would be helpful to them—management of academic life, teaching, manuscript preparation, faculty citizenship, and more.”

Above all, Eckert and Boss hope readers will come away with a better understanding of how to navigate the academic world. Says Boss, “The major tips for readers are be aware of the traps, seek advice from your senior colleagues, finish reading the book, and enjoy your science.”

Heartbreak in Russia
Spencer aids Red Cross nurses

Dr. Linda Spencer has delivered aid and expertise to those in need
throughout the world.

Two bodyguards accompanied
Spencer while she was in the
Northern Caucasus to assess
the Visiting Nurses Program of the
Russian Red Cross. These nurses
often are the only contact that veterans and other homebound patients have with the outside world.

 

Dr. Linda Spencer, associate professor (clinical) and director of the Public Health Nursing Leadership program, has traveled through some of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. Whether traveling by helicopter or on foot accompanied by armed bodyguards, Spencer has been at the forefront of international nursing for 22 years. Yet nothing prepared her for the suffering she witnessed last year in the Northern Caucasus.

During the mid-1990s, Spencer spent 18 months in Russia as director of training for the Visiting Nurses Program of the Russian Red Cross. She returned last August as an American Red Cross (ARC) delegate working with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Her mission was to assess the Visiting Nurses Program in the Northern Caucasus, a volatile area in southern Russia bordering Georgia and Azerbaijan and including the war-torn Republic of Chechnya.

“Many of the visiting nurses’ patients are men who are veterans of World War II,” says Spencer. “They have dedicated their lives to their country but now have been forgotten by their government and treated as a burden. For many of them, the visits from the Red Cross nurses are the only contact they have with the outside world. It was heartbreaking.”

It is equally difficult for the veterans’ widows, many of whom are now in their 80s and 90s. One of the women Spencer met had trained as a sniper during the war. “These women held the country together while the men were gone,” she says. “Someone needs to look after them.”

Years of civil war in Chechnya have sent thousands of displaced persons into the Northern Caucasus seeking safety. The region was further inundated last June after more than 300,000 people were displaced by heavy rainfall in southern Russia.

“There is no health care system to take care of patients, and many have been left alone by their families, so the Visiting Nurses Program is the only thing sustaining them,” Spencer explains. “The nurses serve the elderly and disabled who are frequently trapped in their apartments because they can’t use the stairs, and there are no elevators. The nurses deliver food parcels from the ICRC, but that will end when the grant expires. I don’t know how these people will survive.”

The visiting nurses face their own difficulties. No one owns a car. In large cities, the nurses rely on public transportation to take food and medicine to their clients. In outlying regions, nurses deliver them on foot.

“The visiting nurses do what they can, but they have almost nothing to work with,” says Spencer. “They need bandages, thermometers, everything. One nurse told me she would love to have a bicycle.”

Despite the conditions, visiting nurses are highly dedicated and grateful to earn an income in a nation where unemployment is high. But their future is uncertain. ARC funding to improve Russian Red Cross branches in the Northern Caucasus and support the Visiting Nurses Program ran out at the end of 2002. ICRC support continues
but will end soon.

“It’s really sad. It’s such a wonderful program,” says Spencer. “I’d love to be involved again if the funding becomes available to support it. It needs to be done.”—Jane Devilbiss

 


top


 

From the Dean  |  News Briefs  |  New Developments  |  Alumni News
Strong Partners in Cancer Care |  Powerful Lessons Taking Root

Alumni Weekend 2002
  |  Milestones

Copyright © Emory University, 2003. All Rights Reserved.
Send comments to hsnews@emory.edu.