Nursing alumna Kristen Stirling (’06) MSN, APRN, FNP-BC founded Tennessee Telederm, PLLC, earlier this year. This is the first telehealth company of its kind in Tennessee, which focuses on diagnosis and treatment of skin conditions.

Prior to founding Tennessee Telederm, Stirling worked in dermatology at a large multi-specialty practice in Nashville for 13 years and the Burn Unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center prior to that.

At the onset of COVID-19, Stirling began offering telehealth appointments to her patients. Telehealth proved to be a popular and effective means for treating many skin conditions. Tennessee Telederm grew as a natural result of these safe and convenient appointments.

Tennessee Telederm strives to give everyone across Tennessee access to high-quality dermatology care through online video appointments.

Graduate Nursing students Mosam Patel and Kelsey Wolfe have been selected as the 2020 Area Health Education Center (AHEC) Scholars at the Matthew Walker Comprehensive Health Center.

This program is designed for health professions students interested in supplementing their education by gaining additional knowledge and experience in rural and/or underserved urban settings. In this two-year program, students will receive 40 hours of didactic training and 40 hours of clinical training each year along with a stipend. The students will receive core content around interprofessional education, behavioral health integration, social determinants of health, cultural competency, practice transformation and current and emerging health issues.

This experience is an opportunity for these students to gain knowledge, skills and experiences that will help them meet the needs of underserved populations.

Continue reading →

Dr. Laura Gray, Assistant Professor of Nursing, answers questions about her recent research project.

What is your research topic? Why did you choose it?
Sleep in children with ADHD and their families.

What are some of your most interesting results?
Parent ADHD symptoms can impact children’s sleep hygiene and some objectively measured sleep parameters such as sleep onset latency (time it takes the child to fall asleep) and wake after sleep onset (waking up during the night).

What is the importance/application of your research?
Since about half of children who are diagnosed with ADHD will have a parent with ADHD, it is important for clinicians to recognize the shared behaviors and how they impact child sleep. This may point to a need for specifically tailored sleep education with structured schedules, sticker charts, checklists and other concrete supports.

Where have you presented your research?
Presented at the Southern Nursing Research Society meetings. Published in Pediatric Nursing. I am working with researchers at Vanderbilt to expand sleep education to families of typically developing children.

Belmont University’s School of Nursing received a $285,000 Nurse Faculty Loan Program (NFLP) grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to address the national shortage of nurse educators who are committed to educating the next generation of nurses and family nurse practitioners.

Dr. Cathy Taylor, dean of the College of Health Sciences and Nursing, stated, “Congratulations to the School of Nursing and primary authors, Dr. Martha Buckner and Dr. Linda Wofford, for securing funding to initiate an exciting new chapter for graduate nursing at Belmont. This award will enable us to support talented students and directly impact the growing national shortage of nurse educators in a meaningful way. It’s a win-win.”

In addition to the traditional Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) education in the family nurse practitioner (FNP) role, students will obtain coursework specific to the role of a nursing educator. Students in the Belmont NFLP will benefit from mentor-ship, strong nurse educator preparation, as well as monetary support to pursue doctoral education and loan forgiveness. Easing the financial barrier to doctoral education will improve the supply of nurse educators and nurse practitioner preceptors.

The program will provide loan forgiveness of up to 85 percent of Belmont tuition, fees and associated costs if graduates are employed full time as family nurse practitioner preceptors or faculty in any school of nursing in the United States for four years following graduation. Students will have one year after graduation to secure appropriate employment. Continue reading →

Group photo of the Air Force Reserve unit at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx

Alumna Lara Stahl, nursing class of 2004, is battling COVID-19 on two fronts: as a regional clinical operations director and family nurse practitioner for Premise Health in Fort Worth, Texas and as a Captain in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, serving as a clinical nurse.

Both Stahl’s civilian and military roles have been wrapped around fighting COVID-19 for the past couple of months. In late February, Stahl was asked to join the corporate COVID-19 clinical response team for Premise Health. Her team had the enormous task of virtually providing care through their many wellness centers across the United States. Stahl was hard at work on that project before she was deployed with the Air Force Reserves on April 5 to support the COVID-19 response in New York City, as the pandemic was overwhelming the community and city hospital system.

Stahl’s role has been to act as a clinical nurse at the Jacobi Medical Center, a city hospital in the Bronx. “Since coming here, I have been with the people of my reserve unit 24/7, and I have realized how noble a cause our reserve forces are taking on with this COVID-19 response. We all left our families and jobs to come here to serve our country in a way that has never been done by the Air Force Reserve,” Stahl explained. Continue reading →

Balancing life as a Belmont Women’s Soccer player and a nursing major presents challenges. Overcoming those obstacles, however, has helped Belmont alumnae grow stronger as nurses.

Lauren Paynter, Heather Ferrari, Meg Howard, Ali Alcott, Patience Whitten, Emily Jones, Lauren Trappey and many others are Belmont Women’s Soccer alumnae currently working in the healthcare field and helping the United States fight COVID-19.

“Learning things like teamwork and leadership, I’ve used those types of skills every day that I’ve worked as a nurse,” Paynter said. “Especially now during this virus outbreak, we’ve really had to come together within the hospital setting. Using those learning aspects (at Belmont) has been very valuable.” Continue reading →

Nursing alumna Kelsey Maguire, Class of 2014

Kelsey Maguire, alumna of the School of Nursing’s Class of 2014, presented research with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) Nursing Research Fellowship in January 2020. Maguire works as a registered nurse in the MSKCC Urgent Care Center (UCC), a specialized 24-hour unit dedicated to the treatment of emergent medical issues in patients undergoing treatment for cancer at MSKCC in New York, New York.

Maguire’s study, titled “Frequency of Oncologic Emergency Visits to a Comprehensive Cancer Center Urgent Care Center: A Descriptive Cohort Study,” aims to describe the number and frequency of patient visits to the UCC and identify groups of oncologic patients reporting for emergency care multiple times within a year.

The study was conducted through a Retrospective Chart Review of all patients visiting the unit in 2018 in hopes of filling a gap in the literature describing the utilization of the oncologic Emergency Department. The results of this study hope to inform future work to proactively identify and improve outcomes for patients at high risk for unplanned care.

Next steps for the project include follow-up studies at the institution, as well as applications to present a poster at the Oncology Nursing Society Congress in San Antonio, Texas, and publish the results.

Dr. Beth Hallmark, director of simulation for the College of Health Sciences and Nursing and National League for Nursing (NLN) fellow, recently assisted in facilitating a virtual NLN Town Hall.

This online meeting of NLN experts and nurse educators focused on strategies for online teaching and learning with the recent transition to online courses due to the challenges of COVID-19. Through this virtual meeting, nurse educators were able to engage in discussion regarding how to best continue a sufficient learning experience virtually by asking questions, sharing ideas and offering solutions that have seen results thus far.

The conversation centered on various ways to ensure requirements for graduation were met for students nearing graduation, as well as ways to offer secure testing methods virtually. A large emphasis of the meeting was on creative online teaching and learning strategies. Ideas for teaching students in this ever-evolving situation ranged from tactics to enhance critical thinking to teaching in community to solutions for remote simulation.

With the cancellation of clinical rotations for students, Hallmark has dedicated her time to developing innovative simulation events to continue to meet student’s education needs. Like many, Hallmark is adapting to a dynamic situation to continue preparing the next generation of professional nurses.

Belmont nursing students jumped at the chance to help out during a time of crisis. Caleb Smith, Rachel Poston, Peyton Rivers, William Pegram, Mariam Fakhar, Leigh Holdsambeck and Sally Dean teamed up with other student nursing volunteers from Middle Tennessee State University to provide critical support for several public information lines in Tennessee.

Headquartered at either the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) or the Metro Nashville Health Department (MHD), COVID19 hotlines were established to meet a dramatic uptick in calls from Tennesseans searching for reliable information as the number of cases started to rise. Continue reading →

Belmont Nursing alumnus Shannon Ellrich (G2009) was featured in a front page story in the March 30 edition of The Tennessean. Ellrich and fellow Vanderbilt Medical Center nurse practitioner Kathleen Donais took on the challenge of creating COVID-19 testing sites out of thin air in a hospital parking deck and a tent on Dayton Avenue in south Nashville.

According to The Tennessean:

Few medical professionals have experience in a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic. But Ellrich does.
She graduated from Belmont University in 2009 and then served as a nurse corps officer in the U.S. Army. She was deployed to Liberia from October 2014 through March 2015 for the Ebola outbreak.
It was an introduction to infectious disease control and protective gear like what is being worn to treat patients now.

Read the full story in The Tennessean (subscription may be required).

More than half of Tennessee’s population live in rural areas where access to health care is limited and higher rates of poverty and poor health outcomes are the norm. Last week, College of Health Sciences faculty and Doctor of Nursing Practice students Samuel Lewis and Ashlyn Upshaw attended a Nashville Health Care Council event to learn more about this growing national problem.

“Solving the Rural Health Care Puzzle: National, State and Provider Perspectives” featured an expert panel moderated by Bill Frist, MD, former US Senate majority leader, and included Alan Levine, executive chairman, president and CEO of Ballad Health; Sarah Chouinard, MD, chief medical officer for Community Care of West Virginia; and Stuart C. McWhorter, commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration.

Panelists addressed rural health challenges including health disparities, workforce shortages, the need for systems innovation and the move to reimbursement for value over volume-based care.

On November 5, 2019, Nursing Clinical Placement Coordinator Amanda Waterman, MSN, RN was awarded the Heart of Hospice Award from Alive Hospice.

Waterman connected Belmont’s graduate nursing program with Alive for end-of-life care training. Her advocacy also led to Alive’s first academic clinical research project in 2018 on stress and coping in hospice care teams.

Alive’s Heart of Hospice Awards honor community leaders in end-of-life care. These individuals are incredible educators, partners, connectors, donors and volunteers whose support for Alive’s mission has brought comfort and dignity to dying patients and their families. Alive serves nearly 4,000 hospice patients and family members each year and provides nearly two million dollars in financial support for those who need help covering the costs of their care. Thousands more benefit from Alive’s free end-of-life education and affordable grief counseling.

Belmont Student Nurses Association (SNA) officers Hannah Burgtorf, Ally Hoffbaur, Annie Hiler, Miranda Nicholson and Nathalia Daniels worked with representatives from the American Red Cross to plan and host a blood drive on campus.

The drive resulted in the collection of 75 pints of blood. Every two seconds, someone in the U.S. needs a blood transfusion.

Dr. Sandy Murabito, associate professor of nursing and undergraduate program director noted, “Health care professionals rely on available blood and blood products which lead to positive health outcomes. However only 3 percent of available donors give blood. Promoting blood drives with easy access is one good way to increase the Red Cross Blood supply. The Student Nurses Association is working to spread the word about this need. The Red Cross and the Student Nurses Association sincerely appreciate the donations from Belmont students, faculty and staff to give back to our community.”