Columbia Nursing: Changing Lives around the World
By Bobbie Berkowitz, PhD, RN, FAAN Dean, Columbia University School of Nursing
For more than 100 years Florence Nightingale’s vision of what we would now call “health for all” has inspired nurses to provide compassionate care throughout the world. Today, nurses supply between 60 and 80 percent of global health care. In many countries, they are the only source of care a family or community might encounter in an entire lifetime.
Our school has participated on a global scale for many years. Among our many activities have been contributing the evidence-based research for a worldwide standard to reduce infection through effective hand washing. Our faculty have long shared their expertise and promoted clinical scholarship and educational innovations through active involvement in international conferences and organizations and providing technical expertise on issues such as emergency preparedness, maternal and infant health, and HIV care and treatment. Since 1994, our school has been a WHO Collaborating Center for Advanced Practice Nursing, one of only 10 such centers in the United States. And we have maintained a long-standing relationship with a family health clinic in the Dominican Republic city of La Romana, where our students participate in clinical rotations and collaborate on such interdisciplinary projects as developing educational materials on hygiene, assessing the nutritional status of adults with HIV, and conducting evaluations of social services.
But as nations around the world, including our own, wrestle with socio-economic and population-based health inequities, there is a continuing need to build on this solid foundation and intensify our school’s commitment to the nursing profession in populations and countries of high need. Shortly after my arrival as dean, with the help of a committee of faculty and staff, we established the Office of Global Initiatives as part of our strategic plan. Under the guidance of Dr. Elaine Larson, and her colleagues, the Office reached many important milestones and, just last year, Jennifer Dohrn, RN, DNP, CNM became the new director, bringing the same passion and vision as Dr. Larson.
Our global momentum will be increasing significantly as a result of two recent grants from Columbia University President’s Global Innovation Fund. The three-year Global Nursing Research Development is a collaboration among Columbia’s Global Center in Africa, the Forum of University Nursing Deans of South Africa, the University of Malawi/Kamuzu College of Nursing, and the University of Nairobi School of Nursing. Among the many facets of this ambitious project will be to create an evidence-based system for identifying gaps in nursing care in sub-Saharan Africa and develop an education program to address them. The initiative will introduce a similar collaboration anchored by the Columbia Global Center in Amman, Jordan for use throughout the Middle East and then extend it to other CU Global Centers.
The second grant is for the Children’s Global Oral Health Initiative, a CUMC four-school consortium which will involve our school carrying out telehealth projects over the next three years in Nairobi, Kenya, with a focus on children with HIV/AIDS.
Our Office of Global Initiatives has also recently made a poster presentation at the Consortium of Universities in Global Health and participated in the International Confederation of Midwives’ 30th Triennial Congress, entitled Midwifery: Millennium Development Goals after 2015, attended by more than 3,800 midwives from over 100 countries.
Our dedication to global nursing plays a central part in our education mission as well. Beginning this fall our curriculum will include a module called Addressing Population Health Needs on a Global Scale, which will help students identify and address issues of health equity from a nursing perspective. In addition, students from our nurse practitioner and PhD programs will begin rotations at La Clinica de Familia in the Dominican Republic next month. And students from our women’s-health nurse practitioner program will spend three weeks at the University of Malawi/Kamuzu College of Nursing in southeast Africa as part of their clinical practicum.
Our school is certainly increasing its global nursing activities. But global health is, as Dr. Dohrn often remarks, something nurses deliver whenever they come into contact with cultures and perspectives different from their own, whether at a clinic in Nairobi, Kenya or the Washington Heights community of New York City. Population-based health disparities persist regardless of a country’s geopolitical borders or GDP. This perspective and the responsibility to act on it have become a central and permanent part of our mission, one to which we are proudly committed.