newsletter Fall 2020 • Issue 11
Faculty, students, alumni and partners: Supporting the health and healing of families and society through innovations in nursing practice has been the mission of the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society since the beginning. We couldn’t have imagined when we crafted it—or even when we published last year’s newsletter in the early months of 2020—what was in store for us this year.
The Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society at Minnesota State University, Mankato is dedicated to providing leadership and expertise in family and societal health at local, state, national and international levels. The Institute, Taylor Visiting Scholars and Becky Taylor Doctoral Fellowships are made possible by a $7 million endowment established by Glen and Becky Taylor.
The world has been upended by a global pandemic that has hit close to home for our nurse educators, students and partners across the health care field. The nation has also seen increased awareness of racial disparities and calls for justice. The uncertainty of the last 12 months has only made us more resolute in our commitment to health and healing for families and society. Nursing embraces empathy and inclusiveness. We strive to gain understandings of the impact of relationships on health and the significance of human dignity and policies that impact health. Nurses value bringing people together, ensuring all voices are heard and fostering meaningful conversations that create change. The Taylor Nursing Institute is committed to joining nurses and other organizations in working toward healing and tackling the pervasive inequities and vulnerabilities in our society that threaten the health of individuals, families and communities. In the following pages, you’ll read about research guided by our faculty and Becky Taylor fellows addressing COVID-19 in minority and immigrant communities, as well as the health and wellbeing of nurses on the front lines of the pandemic at home and abroad. We also describe educational innovations that deepen the understandings of our students and support their new directions. We could not have predicted the year behind us, and we mourn for the families and communities who have suffered stress and loss. Still, I remain proud of our faculty, colleagues and students who continue to show up and move forward into an unknown future. As Director of the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society I am committed to listening and engaging in real dialogue surrounding the concerns of families and society. Please feel free to talk with me about ways the Taylor Institute can support you, your family and your community. My wish for you remains a safe and healthy year ahead filled with hope and resilience.
Kind Regards, Sandra Eggenberger
Sandra Eggenberger Honored On October 16, Minnesota State Mankato president, Richard Davenport named Sandra Eggenberger Distinguished Faculty and Founding Director of the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society. Davenport made the announcement during a Zoom meeting with School of Nursing faculty and staff. “I’ve been proud of this program since day one,” Davenport said. “You meet the challenges head on—no more so than during this time. The work you have done has not gone unnoticed.” The distinction is the first of its kind at the University and acknowledges Eggenberger’s decade of committed leadership to the Institute, including raising its profile to an international level. “I’m so proud to work with you,” noted Dean Kristine Retherford. “You have put all of us—the University and the College—on an international stage because of your work.” Eggenberger’s colleagues had a chance to sing her praises in a video of appreciation. Among them, Lynn Kuechle recalled when she interviewed with Eggenbereger for the position of Taylor Coordinator. Eggenberger spoke with such passion and vision, Kuechle knew she could get on board. “I’ve been proud of this program since day one,” Davenport said. “One of the reasons is because the program staff and students meet the challenges head on, which has been demonstrated more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic! We cannot say thank you loud enough to Glen and Becky Taylor for making this program a reality. Like any worthwhile challenge, the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society has required a true leader who is willing to work tirelessly to help everyone realize the dreams of the nursing program. That person is Dr. Sandra Eggenberger!”
International Family Nursing Conference goes Virtual in 2021 Like so many events over the past year, the 15th International Family Nursing Conference (IFNC15) is going virtual. The conference theme, Family Nursing Throughout the Life Course, will address caring for patients and their families from the perinatal period through older adulthood and end of life care. “The conference will emphasize promoting national and international collaborations among families, researchers, educators and clinicians to promote the capacity and capability of family nurses as advocates for optimal family health and well-being throughout the life course.” Several School of Nursing faculty, students, and partners will be attending to share their scholarship and innovations. Since its inception, International Family Nursing Association (IFNA) and IFNC have been a vital part of the Institute’s ability to engage with nurses and nurse educators around the world. The International Family Nursing Association partners with the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society and College of Allied Health and Nursing in our shared mission. The conference runs from Monday, June 28-Friday, July 2. Learn more about IFNC15 at internationalfamilynursing.org.
Faculty Sustain Community Practice Partnerships Goals of the Institute include creating partnerships than influence the health of families and society. The Institute collaborates with healthcare systems to influence nursing practice, educational systems to advance education, and organizations that share our mutual goals. Collaborations at the regional and global level supported the mission and vision of the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society. The Institute supported our practice partners with food and messages of appreciation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students and Faculty Learning During a Pandemic As COVID-19 hit the United States in March the University was forced to stop face to face instruction following Spring Break. Faculty were given one week to reimagine all coursework and simulation. The Mankato Free Press (https://www. mankatofreepress.com/news/local_news/from-the-classroom-to-the-front-linesof-the-covid-19-fight/article_533c880a-7437-11ea-ba9b-233d40525d57.html) reported, working with the Board of Nursing, the schools came up with some adjustments to the standards that allow those final hours of clinical experience to be replaced with online simulations of medical emergencies and other health care scenarios. The Taylor Institute shared online resources with faculty to support virtual learning.
Meet Our 2020 Becky Taylor Fellows Minnesota State University, Mankato Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students have the opportunity to apply for a Becky Taylor Fellowship through the Glen Taylor Nursing Institute for Family and Society. This fellowship supports education, practice, and translational research focused on improving family and societal health. The Becky Taylor Fellows are selected through a competitive application process and the funding supports their doctoral education.
Nkeiru Adoga
Woodbury, MN
Adoga earned her BSN in 1998. It was a proud moment for the Nigerian immigrant, “but I know nursing education is ongoing process,” she says. “Getting my DNP will make me the first woman in my entire village to obtain graduate studies. This will inspire other girls too.” Adoga works at Regions Hospital, and like many nurses has been hard at work during the pandemic to support and care for a community in crisis. As COVID-19 spread, Professor Felicia Ikebude asked Adoga to join her in doing research into how the pandemic is affecting minority and immigrant communities. Adoga will look into advanced care planning, specifically how to talk with communities about making plans for healthcare “and how you need to plan not only for your work and school and finances, but also to [make a] plan about your health care and the decisions you’d like and not like in case you get sick,” says Adoga. “As you know COVID hit the minority populations harder than any other group, specifically the black population, African Americans and immigrants. They’re my community, they’re the people I connect with.”
Chelsi Esqueda
Mankato, MN
A nurse for nearly 20 years, Esqueda’s ultimate goal is working with the immunology department with immunocompromised patients. “My son has an immune compromised system and that’s really my passion is to help people with difficult complex cases,” she says. This goal is in part what led her to step out of her comfort zone and apply for the DNP program at Minnesota State Mankato. “I had been in hospital 18 years as a nurse and I kind of always found myself trying to figure things out and help people and fix things,” she says. “I was intimidated by doing the nurse practitioner program but that was my passion to go further into my education and try to help people at a higher level.” Now as a Becky Taylor Fellow, Esqueda is working at the Health Commons at Pond to develop a family program for children with type 1 diabetes mellitus and their families. “We are trying to help go over management and nutrition [and develop] support group sessions for both the child with diabetes and parents; and to provide extra support for high schoolers that are transitioning into becoming more independent,” she says.
Tiffany Gordon
Shakopee, MN
Gordon, a pediatric nurse by trade, was drawn to nursing education while working at Gillette Children’s in the Twin Cities. She continues to work as an outpatient on-call nurse for Gillette, but her full-time gig is as Workforce Development Coordinator at Minnesota State Mankato’s School of Nursing. As a mother of three with two jobs, Gordon has appreciated the flexibility in the DNP program—both online and in person in Edina. Gordon’s fellowship project was born out of a meeting she attended at Mankato’s Cada House where a representative from the Child and Family Advocacy Center of Southcentral Minnesota spoke about the distance sexually abused children have to travel to receive an examination by a certified provider. “Coming from a person who is a pediatric nurse that stings my heart,” she says. Gordon has partnered with Minnesota Children’s Alliance and is working to increase the capacity of pediatric SANE nurses and/or pediatric child abuse providers in Minnesota. “I want to find out what would encourage more providers to become certified and what we can do to support them.”
Lauren Lehmkuhl
Minneapolis, MN
Lehmkuhl had been working with Twin Cities Orthopedics in neurosurgery/spine surgery for only a few months before being laid off due to COVID-19. While challenging, it became an opportunity to get back to the work she feels most passionately about. “One thing I felt during that period was this draw, this need inside me to return to care that focused on families and society,” says Lehmkuhl who had previously worked in a community clinic with Hennepin Health Care. “I took a situation that was not ideal—having a layoff and looking for employment—and saw this window of opportunity to return to school and finish my doctorate.” Lehmkuhl is staying focused on her goal to support social and racial justice as she works on her Fellowship project. She hopes to develop a program modeled on Reach Out and Read that would provide interventions in primary care to address empathy and antiracism in early childhood. “Science supports [that these] interventions can improve health outcomes,” she says. “I am interested in exploring how we can expand on that with empathy and antiracism interventions.”
Meet Our 2020 Becky Taylor Fellows Nyeba Manston-Dunbar
Brooklyn Center, MN
Manston-Dunbar immigrated to the United States from Liberia as a teenager in the early 1990s. She holds a BS in nursing from the University of Rhode Island and a master’s degree in nursing with a focus in public health and adolescent health from the University of Minnesota. Manston-Dunbar is engaged in a project to uncover the prevalence and factors contributing to medication and treatment non-adherence in immigrant communities. She hopes to use her research to develop tools and strategies to improve adherence, ultimately leading to positive health outcomes for immigrant populations. “Because of the limitation with face-to-face interactions with immigrants because of COVID-19, I am also looking at options to provide education and tools to providers who care for immigrants to promote positive health outcomes,” she says. Even amid COVID, Manston-Dunbar is committed to supporting immigrant communities through the newly founded Liberian Nurses Association. “In the beginning of COVID … we provided food for the elderly in the senior high-rise buildings because we wanted to protect them and keep them indoors because many of them have underlying health issues that increase detrimental health risks to COVID-19,” she says.
Sarah Ogilvie
Excelsior, MN
Family nursing is technically Ogilvie’s third career. She started as a chemical engineer but transitioned to nursing to allow for more flexibility and part time work as she raised her five children. She has been working in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Minnesota for the past 11 years. “My kids are older [now] and I was ready for a challenge,” she says. “So, I decided to go back to graduate school and pursue family nurse practitioner.” She chose Minnesota State Mankato because of the program’s family focus. “I’ve learned that in my own practice in the NICU you’re not just caring for that baby, you’re also caring for the baby in the context of their whole family,” she says. “If you don’t consider that you’re not going to have very good outcomes.” For her Fellowship project, Ogilvie is putting her family nursing training into practice, working through PONDS to develop educational resources for children with type 1 diabetes and their families. “A lot of the literature shows having some peer support both for parents and the children with diabetes and even their siblings really help these families to function better,” she says.
Meet Our 2020 Becky Taylor Fellows Rochelle Perry
Le Center, MN
A former ER and ICU nurse, Perry is a passionate advocate for patients who struggle with mental health and substance use. It’s exactly this passion for comprehensive and accessible mental health care that led her to the DNP program. “We have gaps in our current health system, I’d even say failures,” she says. “I want to be able to use the language and have the tools to be effective in attempting to navigate those system changes at any level.” Perry’s fellowship project will focus on substance use and how to support both the patients and their families in accessing and maintaining recovery. “We know substance use doesn’t just affect the patient struggling with addiction, but it affects the family unit and the community as a whole,” she says. “… When access to care for substance use is evaluated, 91 percent of people who are struggling are unable to access care. It’s not just because they’re choosing not to. There are so many barriers that need to be addressed. My goal is to narrow the gap.”
Cy Schweiss
Sleepy Eye, MN
One of Schweiss’ proudest nursing moments happened recently. “I had gentleman who had been transferred to our facility (with COVID-19). He hadn’t seen his family for months,” she says “I moved all the furniture in the room and pushed his bed up to the window and raised it up so he could look out the window and see his grandchildren. I don’t think I’d ever seen that man smile so big.” The encounter sums up what Schweiss loves about nursing: the connection to people. As a student in the DNP program, Schweiss has enjoyed the program’s focus on caring for the whole family. “It does make such a difference in the patient’s life and in their health and outcomes and families’ outcomes too,” she says. “You’re not just taking care one person you’re taking care of all of them in a sense.” Schweiss is currently collaborating with Professor Kristen Abbott Anderson on two projects related to COVID-19. The first is aimed at discovering how COVID-19 is affecting nursing staff. The second is an international project focused on the caregivers of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients in long-term care.
Nurses’ Stories: Front and Center Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses have been on the front lines, heading in to work every day and caring for patients amid unprecedented circumstances. But what’s going on behind the headlines and statistics? That’s what associate professor of nursing Tammy Neiman and her colleagues wanted to find out. “Back in April or May, I went to work at the hospital and was very anxious going to work with this new pandemic/disease,” she says. “I was thinking about this whole experience and … I felt like this work of nurses needed to be recorded for historical purposes.” Neiman, along with colleagues Sandra Eggenberger, Pat Beierwaltes and David Clisbee, launched a project to collect and analyze nurses’ stories in order to learn how nurses are dealing with work and life during the pandemic. “Hopefully, through learning what nurses are doing now to cope with working in an uncertain and changing environment, our research will be able to guide other nurses confronted with this,” says Neiman. “Also, in the future, if we have another experience like this, we can help those nurses too. It doesn’t have to be a pandemic situation but rather any new experiences that have a lot uncertainty and changes in practice.”
Study looks at ADRD patients and their families amid the global pandemic Associate professor of nursing, Kristen Abbott-Anderson has partnered with researchers in Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong to explore the experiences of family members who care for those with Alzheimer’s disease or associated dementia (ADRD) during COVID-19. Abbott-Anderson and her colleagues hope research with ADRD patients living in long-term care and their families will result in a deeper understanding about the social interaction and engagement processes between family members, residents, and care staff across diverse cultural contexts. We asked Abbot-Anderson to share more about the project’s origins and aim. Here’s what she said. Q: What was the origin of the project? A: People living with ADRD, even when (and maybe especially) when living in a care facility, are dependent on their family and close carers for social interaction and engagement. Family/close carers are often in the role of advocate for their loved one with ADRD. The restrictions due to COVID-19 place the person living with ADRD at increased risk for social isolation and the potential for depression. Based on what we have experienced, we also believe these restrictions create greater stress/distress for family and close carers. Family/close carers may feel between a rock and a hard place where their power is limited in terms of advocating for their loved one or assuring that their loved one is receiving adequate care. I was curious if other countries with similar long term care (LTC) settings were experiencing similar phenomena. Q: What knowledge do you hope to gain? A: Our study will use a Constructive Grounded Theory approach. We hope to learn about the experiences of family and close carers and communication with the LTC providers (barriers and facilitators); the impact on these carers’ level of stress/distress; and other new information that will emerge from the data. Q: How will you use this research? A: We believe our findings will contribute to theory development about LTC for people living with ADRD and the patient triad (patient/ family-close carer/professional care provider). Our findings should also provide an opportunity to reflect on current challenges in LTC, especially for those individuals living with ADRD and their family/close carers and to explore ways in which overall care can be improved.
Experiential Learning Module Spans Cultures Nursing students in Professor Hans De Ruiter’s Families in Crisis course are afforded a semester-long cross-cultural experience in the Experiential Learning International Module. The project allows students from Mankato to connect with peers around the world and work together to explore solutions to family crises. The cross-cultural connections allow them to see how common crises play out differently within different societal structures. “It really is intended for them to get some insights of different ways of doing things,” says De Ruiter. “It’s not about what system is better, it’s really about seeing how different cultures address [crises], both the advantages and disadvantages associated with that.” The module began about three years ago with 80 students and one partner university in the Netherlands. This year 280 students from the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, South Africa and Japan teamed up to work out shared crises across borders. Students come away from the project with a better understanding of another culture and—because they’ve had to explain it to others—a heightened awareness of how their own systems function in crisis. De Ruiter also notes that student groups usually stay in touch after the class ends, contributing to a national network of nursing colleagues and even expanding participants’ social circles. “It sounds cheesy, but I think a highlight would be that we gained a couple new friends,” one participant wrote in a post-module evaluation. “We really did have a lot of fun talking to each other so much so that the assignments did not really feel like much work at all.”
Minnesotan and Brazilian Researchers Partner in COVID-19 Nursing Study Global health care systems are facing significant demands and uncertainties amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Nurses in hospital systems have endured multiple stresses, increased workload, threats, anxiety and frustrations. Ongoing stress and emotional trauma occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to impact nurses’ ability to provide the best possible care to patients and families. A group of nurse researchers from Minnesota State University, Mankato, Winona State University and Sao Paolo University, Brazil are interested in learning the impact of COVID-19 on nurses from a global perspective. Promoting nurse well-being during and following the COVID-19 response begins with understanding the experience of nurses caring for patients and families during this unprecedented time. The overall research question for this study is: “What is the experience of providing nursing care to patients and families in the context of COVID-19 in Brazil and the United States?” Examining this question across two countries with with a high incidence of COVID-19 will provide an opportunity to discern nurse experiences that may be universal and experiences that may be country-specific.