First Columbia Nursing, NYP Psych Nursing Summit a Success
Columbia University School of Nursing and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) held their inaugural Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing Summit, “Managing Psychiatric Nursing Complexities in Today’s Diverse Landscape,” on September 26, 2024.
“This event represents the strong on-going collaboration between Columbia Nursing and NYP to advance nursing knowledge and clinical practice. In this case we focused on the much-needed area of mental health with a huge response of interest among nurses at NYP as well as faculty and students at Columbia Nursing,” said Assistant Professor Kasey Jackman, PhD ’17, who organized the event with Reynaldo Rivera, DNP, the director of nursing research and innovation and continuing professional development at NYP and an assistant professor of clinical nursing at Columbia Nursing, and other NYP colleagues.
Columbia Nursing hosted the full-day continuing education event for psychiatric nurses featuring innovative strategies and evidence-based practices for providing compassionate, culturally competent, and effective mental health care. Attendees also developed their skills and knowledge by exploring advancements in the field and engaging in case studies reflecting real-world scenarios.
Philip Wilner, MD, senior vice president and chief operating officer for NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester Behavioral Health Center and president and chief executive officer of Gracie Square Hospital, oversees behavioral health services across all NYP campuses, and provided opening remarks.
Kathleen Wheeler, PhD, a professor and director of the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program at Fairfield University Egan School of Nursing in Fairfield, Connecticut, was the keynote speaker. Her talk, “Resilience/Relationship: A Comprehensive Framework for Practice,” explored the widespread, underrecognized effects of trauma on mental and physical health, and the importance of human connection in healing. She offered a case study of a woman with panic attacks, crippling anxiety, and multiple other troubling symptoms who dramatically improved after her history of trauma was identified and she was treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, or EMDR.
“Most patients don’t connect all these symptoms,” she said, “and neither do we.” But by recognizing and treating trauma holistically, Wheeler added, clinicians can help patients heal.
Recognizing, treating effects of trauma on health
In the session “Trauma-Informed Care Across the Lifespan,” Assistant Professor Latisha Hanson, DNP ’15, director of Columbia Nursing’s Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program, which offers a doctor of nursing practice degree, and three other speakers illustrated how to recognize, treat, and even in the youngest patients prevent, the effects of trauma. Elena Abascal, DNP ’21, a consultation-liaison psychiatry NP at NYP-Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), discussed the importance of distress prevention in caring for pediatric inpatients. Alexandre Da Silva, DNP ’22, a psychiatric NP at Gracie Square Hospital who often cares for patients in crisis, said a trauma history should always be included with intake assessments, as well as an inventory of their self-regulation skills. Pat Precin, PhD, an associate professor at NYP-CUIMC, noted that 90% of adults have experienced trauma, and that symptoms of trauma can be confused with signs of aging and may manifest in challenging behaviors.
In “Inspired to Harness the Power of Research: Three Nurses’ Stories,” a session Jackman organized and moderated, Mary Jo Curran, an NP and clinical nurse specialist at NYP-Presbyterian Westchester Behavioral Health Center; Kristen Kolb, a clinical nurse at NYP-CUIMC; and Kimberly Hadson, a staff nurse at NYP-Weill Cornell Medical Center, presented research they conducted as Academic Practice Research Fellows. Jackman directs the Fellowship, which is a competitive, two-year certificate program in which NYP nurses receive support and mentorship from Columbia Nursing faculty and staff to conduct and disseminate original research.
Jackman also presented an afternoon session, “LGBTQ Mental Health: Practice and Research,” with Ray Gannon, PhD, a nurse scientist at NYP and Rasaan Ogilvie, a psychiatric-mental health DNP student at Columbia Nursing. The presentation described mental health disparities affecting the LGBTQ community, a research study the team conducted at NYP about providers’ preparedness to care for LGBTQ patients, and clinical implications for mental health care.
Other topics covered at the summit included stigma toward addiction in the health care community; social determinants of mental health and cultural humility; a patient-centered approach to reducing violence in the inpatient setting; postpartum psychosis; bullying, social media, and child and adolescent mental health; and more.
Featured in photo (L-R): Kristen Kolb, Mary-Jo Curran, Kasey Jackman, Kimberly Hadson, Reynaldo Rivera; Photo credit: Reynaldo Rivera