Commission Members Vote Unanimously for Broward’s Initial Accreditation
 
Dr. Linda Washington-Brown, associate dean of Broward College’s Bachelor of Science program in nursing, has spent a considerable amount of time as a competitive tennis player, but over the past few years, she’s felt more like a sprinter.
 
Finally she’s reached a finish line with notification that Broward College’s RN to BSN program has received initial accreditation from the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission. The letter informing her of accreditation arrived in the last week of March.
 
It’s been an exhaustive experience, she says. In December 2009, the program’s curricular outline was assembled and approved by the Florida Department of Education and by the Broward College District Board of Trustees. The program was unique, designed for nurses working in the field and capable of being completed in a year.
 
When Washington-Brown was hired, she needed to hit the ground running, hiring faculty and staff. The curriculum needed to be fleshed out, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools needed to be notified of the program’s start and the NLNAC needed to be petitioned for candidacy. Washington-Brown and her hard-charging staff got it all done.
 
“It was a lot of work and it was a tight schedule, but we did it,” Washington-Brown said. The college welcomed its first class early in 2011.
 
Members of the class came from a variety of backgrounds and were employed in hospitals, emergency rooms, hospices, pediatrics, geriatrics, critical care, and more. Several were recent graduates; others had up to 20 years of experience. What they all shared was a desire to take their education and career to another level and to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing.
In December of that year, the first class – 22 students – graduated. “Actually 30 successfully completed the program,” Washington-Brown said. “A few had some general education requirements yet to complete.”
 
The accreditation process, though focused and intense, did result in a few nice surprises, Washington-Brown said. First, the vote for accreditation was unanimous, 18-0.
 
“Not only did we go unblemished, we got accolades for how well the program was organized and put forward,” she said. “It was even recommended that we publish our conceptual model and curricular framework in a peer-reviewed, academic journal. We plan to do that.”
 
The accreditation caps off the program’s start and now Washington-Brown gets a little time to kick back, take a deep breath and look at what she and her team created.
 
“It was totally a team effort,” she says. “My faculty and staff knew what they had to do. They didn’t murmur, mumble or complain; they just did it.”


Specializations Focus on Nurse Practitioner, Leadership
 
Barry University’s Division of Nursing in the College of Health Sciences is enhancing the curriculum of its Post-Master’s Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) program to include specializations in nurse practitioner and nursing administration. The program follows an executive format, with classes offered on every other weekend. The 38-credit program can be completed in just four semesters. Post-Master’s DNP students may also be eligible for a 20 percent tuition discount.
 
According to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), DNP-prepared nurses make an estimated $12,000 more annually than nurses with a master’s degree. The DNP translates research into bedside practice and promotes leadership. Skills learned are highly marketable in today’s health care environment. DNP nurses can pursue bedside research, and can teach undergraduate, graduate, and DNP courses.
 
Barry’s valuable immersion experience places DNP students in a clinical area where they do not currently have a lot of experience but are interested in learning more. This new knowledge is presented in the capstone project. In this practice-focused program, students complete the capstone, which can make a significant difference in health care outcomes, delivery of care, and policies. The project is integrated throughout the curriculum, making it easier to complete. The program is structured so that when it is time for students to present their projects, they already have all the tools and research they need.
 
The Division of Nursing provides an exciting educational experience for women and men interested in shaping the health care system of the new century. Barry also offers a pre-nursing program for undergraduates, the Bachelor of Science in Nursing in traditional and accelerated formats, an RN to BSN program, and the Master of Science in Nursing with specializations in nursing executive leadership, nursing education, and nurse practitioner. Registered nurses can advance their career as a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA) with the Master of Science in Anesthesiology. At the doctoral level, Barry also offers the Post-Baccalaureate DNP, the DNP with a specialization in anesthesiology, and the PhD in Nursing.
 
Settling in at new Hollywood location
The College of Health Sciences is completing its first semester at its new location in Hollywood, Florida, planning a free health fair for residents and an open house to showcase its academic programs. Earlier this year, the College relocated its anesthesiology and biomedical sciences graduate programs to Hollywood as part of a partnership with the city. Barry health students, faculty, and staff now occupy a renovated 10,000-square-foot space, located at 421 North 21st Avenue.
 
As one of Hollywood’s newest neighbors, the College scheduled a free health fair at the Fred Lippman Multi-Purpose Center on Saturday, April 14, offering heart health screenings, vaccine assessments, vision screenings, diabetes screenings, podiatric health assessments, and women’s health discussions.
 
An open house was scheduled for Monday, April 23, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, where prospective students could meet faculty and staff, ask questions, and receive information on a number of Barry’s programs including nursing, cardiovascular perfusion, clinical biology, health services administration/public health, and occupational therapy.


When the controversial Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010, it represented the most ambitious overhaul of our country’s healthcare system since the passage of Medicare in 1965. Two years later, all eyes are on the Supreme Court as it debates whether the act is in accordance with the U.S. Constitution. Those of us actually engaged in educating the largest sector of the U.S. healthcare workforce, our nursing professionals, realize that at least for our field, the ship of change has sailed, regardless of the court’s decision. The most sweeping transformation of the nursing profession in our nation’s history is already underway, fueled by the groundbreaking report released jointly by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Institute of Medicine in 2010: The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. As we prepare America’s future nursing professionals to meet the challenge, it is helpful to organize our efforts around the report’s four major missives:
 
Nurses should practice to the full extent of their education and training.
Florida law prohibits advanced practice nurses from prescribing controlled substances, limiting the level of care advanced practice nurses can provide to their patients, especially Family and Acute Care Nurse Practitioners, and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists. Without the full privileges for which their education has prepared them, nurses may not be able to provide adequate medication coverage for certain conditions, or even prescribe non-controlled substances for patients on certain insurance plans that require a provider to have a federal DEA number. Institutional and regulatory limits on nurses’ scope of practice need to be reexamined if our advanced practice graduates are to assume their new roles as leaders in America’s reformed healthcare system.
 
Nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression.
The key word here is “seamless”. It falls to us at the helm of nursing education programs to advocate for the funding of scholarships for RN to BSN and accelerated BSN programs, the latter designed for individuals who hold undergraduate degrees in fields other than nursing – and who often make the best and most motivated students. Special attention must be paid to ensure that these programs are accessible to racial and ethnic minority students so as to ensure that our most educated nurses mirror the diversity of the U.S. population. We must also encourage stronger employer incentives to increase the formal education and the achievement of terminal degrees such as Ph.D.’s and DNP’s among America’s working nurses. The connection between safe patient care and higher education, supported by persuasive evidence, should catalyze these efforts.
 
The RWJ-IOM report calls for doubling the number of nurses with doctoral degrees and increasing nursing professionals with bachelor’s degrees to 80% of the workforce by 2020. This will challenge the critical nurse faculty shortage. It is crucial that we lure our higher-educated nurses to academia, thus feeding the pipeline to educate the next generation of nurses.
 
Nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other healthcare professionals, in redesigning healthcare in the United States.
The development of interdisciplinary collaboration and practice is crucial to the progression of nursing’s future. In my present role as co-Chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Health Project Workforce Committee I can attest to the importance of inter-professional education and practice in the delivery of team-based, patient-centered care. We must find a way to engage our counterparts in schools of allopathic and osteopathic medicine, schools of dentistry and colleges of pharmacy, among others, in this conversation.
 
Effective workforce planning and policy making require better data collection and information infrastructure.
It is impossible to discuss the future of the nursing profession without mentioning the challenges and opportunities resulting from the technological explosion of the 21st century. We have the capacity for a system of healthcare/healthcare workforce data collection and storage that would have been unheard of a few years ago in terms of comprehensiveness, timeliness and public accessibility. Nevertheless, the lack of “real time” data on the health care workforce planning does not allow us as educators to adequately assess the type of nurses that are needed, where and how they should be deployed, and the expertise they need to provide the most valuable contributions to the health of society. Nurse educators face an additional challenge – developing faculty expertise to the level of the available technology. Ensuring that our emerging nursing workforce is equipped with the skills to contribute to and take advantage of the new data collection and information infrastructure is one of the transformative educational challenges of 21st century nursing education.


Nova Southeastern University’s medical school recently expanded its international medical outreach programs to more developing nations with medical and humanitarian aid from students.
 
Countries such as Bangladesh, Peru, and Argentina have been added to the list of nations that already receive medical outreach from NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM). Those nations include Jamaica, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic.
 
During four recent medical outreach endeavors in December, second-year medical students took time off from their winter vacations to travel abroad to rural and medically underserved communities in Peru, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Jamaica to provide medical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, and other medical examinations.
 
Many of these medically underserved patients from poor, rural communities have never seen a physician before and suffer from illnesses such as tuberculosis, scabies, malnutrition, hypertension, and diabetes. The students, supervised by the college’s medical faculty and local physicians, bring medical supplies and provide health and wellness lessons to help patients live healthier lives.
 
In addition to volunteering their vacation time, participating students pay up to $2,000 for their travel expenses. The COM international medical outreach programs will continue this spring with a trip to Ecuador and a summer trip to Jamaica.


Medical Billing and Coding professionals are becoming more and more essential in the modern professional healthcare environment. With a shift in the way medical records are being kept plus a tendency for workplaces to become ever more technologically sophisticated, there are many valid reasons to become proficient and educated in this field now.
 
Part of the U.S. government’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law in 2009 mandates that all medical records be converted to an electronic format by the end of 2014. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment within the field of medical records and health information technicians is expected to grow much faster than average and that job prospects will be very good, with more than 200,000 total and more than 35,000 new positions available nationally by 2018. This represents an overall growth of 20%. According to the BLS website, the yearly median wage for a medical biller / coder is $30,610, with the highest 10% of professionals in the field earning more than $50,000 per year.
 
Medical billers and coders work independently and alongside physicians or within healthcare provider networks. They are responsible for assembling, updating and maintaining patient medical records, managing and ensuring the accuracy of healthcare data and submitting information that provides reimbursement and compensation for medical services rendered to patients. They can also specialize in specific areas such as cancer registry. For the squeamish, this field is one of the handful of healthcare-related jobs that do not involve the hands-on treatment of patients, but still plays a vital role in the patient’s overall care.
 
What can one do to prepare for the future of medical health records? How can individuals gain an advantage on securing a job within one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S.? Consider enrolling in Dade Medical College’s Associate of Science degree program in Medical Billing and Coding, which prepares individuals to become medical billing and coding specialists. Learn the about Universal Coding System, basic medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, pharmacology and more. The program’s 96 quarter credits and 1160 clock hours are spread over 60 weeks in one of four South Florida-based traditional brick and mortar campuses, or you can work at independently by enrolling in our online degree program. With a cost of only $18,050, this degree offers a high return potential on your educational investment.
 
Though licensure is not required to work in the field, it is highly recommended. Dade Medical College’s Medical Billing and Coding program does not currently have a waiting list and the next campus class session begins on March 6. Enrollment is always open for online courses and traditional class sessions begin every four weeks. Join the healthcare revolution – find out more by calling (305) 245-0026 or by logging on to DadeMedical.edu/MBC.