Impacting Community-Based Care
Dr. Rachel Sherman Connects with Community via DNP Project and Social Justice project as she neared completion of her DNP program. Students in FNU’s DNP program must complete a quality improvement project. This project, which is generally conducted with their patient population at their place of work, involves one term dedicated to identifying the project, collecting data, and recruiting participants. After the term break, the students then begin implementing the project, tracking the data and results which are included in a final paper.
Dr. Rachel Sherman It is no secret that 2020 was a very difficult and challenging year. The pandemic, social justice, and political unrest impacted everyone, including Dr. Rachel Sherman, DNP Class 36, APRN, FNP-BC. A DNP student last spring and now a DNP clinical faculty member at FNU, Sherman was working at Prince George’s Hospital Center in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The hospital housed the highest number of COVID-positive patients in the state and, at the height of the pandemic, Dr. Sherman was losing five to six patients per day during her 10- to 12-hour shifts. The stress wasn’t left behind when the workday was over, as she has two children who were attending school from home. She also organized and attended daily social justice protests in the city. Her leadership was recognized as she was presented with the Rosa Parks Award for Excellence in Community Activism at the District 9 Prince George’s County Day of Service Awards this January. In addition to dealing with all of those things, Sherman was also trying to complete her quality improvement
Due to the pandemic, many students like Sherman were no longer able to conduct their projects in a clinical setting. Responding quickly, FNU faculty quickly developed four quality improvement projects which could be conducted virtually. This offered a chance for the students to continue without delaying their academic progress. Sherman was one of the few who could have completed her project at her place of work, but she elected to pursue the virtual option out of concern for the safety of the project participants.
“I felt like it would be a disservice because it would take some of the attention away from the care I actually needed to provide to these COVID patients.”
“I felt like it would be a disservice because it would take some of the attention away from the care I actually needed to provide to these COVID patients,” she said. “It
12 Frontier Nursing University • Quarterly Bulletin
was also safest for me to separate the two because I had to be in the ICU longer, exposed to COVID patients longer, I ran the risk of potentially taking COVID to another patient. It was better to do a virtual project.” Sherman’s project was “Advance Care Planning -- A Patient-Centered Approach to Community-Based Advance Care Planning.” Her social activism heightened her social media presence and when she shared that she was offering a free advance care planning project, the volunteers rolled in. In total, 85 participants signed up for the project in which Sherman intended to help educate the volunteers on what an advance directive is and walk them through the process. To assist with the management of the project, Sherman’s team included another nurse practitioner, a licensed clinical social worker, and a community advocate. “I was worried because I didn’t know how I was going to get people to volunteer to talk about advance care planning when they were already so consumed with everything else that is happening in the world,” Sherman said. “I was worried I wouldn’t have the response that I needed to have a good project. I’m watching my patients die through glass doors. I can’t hold their hands. I’m calling their family. So I’m dealing with the trauma of that and I still have to maintain a focus on my project and my kids. At one point, I thought maybe I needed to sit out for a semester, but then I got so excited to see how things were coming along and the faculty supporting me. You could tell the faculty had a plan. I felt supported. No matter what, I was always going to have somebody to go to.” While it wasn’t the quality improvement project she had planned to do prior to the pandemic, Sherman found that, in talking
