Danny Willis |
Dean, University of Rhode Island College of Nursing
1. What are your priorities for your new position as dean of URI’s College of Nursing? I am prioritizing an engaged community of education, practice, research/scholarship, and service. One of my top priorities is offering cutting-edge nursing education programs that prepare practice-ready nurses. This involves making sure we have excellent faculty, diverse clinical learning sites, inclusive learning environments, various access formats, and innovative active learning pedagogies. Another priority is assuring we offer superb support to our students.
2. How do you hope to use your position to help address the nurse staffing shortages? There are a multitude of factors. One is nurse burnout. There are systems issues that contribute to this problem, including lack of experienced nursing leadership in health care settings, and nurses feeling undervalued. One way I will help address the nursing shortage is to make sure we are preparing nurses at all levels with leadership knowledge and skills to navigate complex situations and understand healthy environments. I want our students to understand complex environments of care, exercise leadership, engage in conflict resolution, conduct critical/hard conversations, advocate for healthy work environments, de-escalate potentially violent situations, and build resilience and self-care practices.
3. Now that Rhode Island has rejoined the nursing licensure compact, how do you expect that to affect staffing levels? The nursing licensure compact should help with the nursing shortage. I am pleased Rhode Island opted to be a compact licensure state.
4. There has been a growing reliance on telehealth. How have you seen this affect the nursing curriculum? We are having conversations about telehealth and how we can amplify knowledge, substantive content and experiences that prepare our students for this evolution of nursing. It is an area of expansion and growth, which we are excited by as we reimagine nursing education.
5. You’ve gained attention for your work on identifying the central unifying focus of nursing as “facilitating humanization, meaning, choice, quality of life, and healing in living and dying” in 2008. How has this focus informed your work? As a nurse, I aim to humanize the experience of health and illness, and engage with individuals, families and communities to understand them. Addressing quality of life, discussing choices and promoting healing is essential to good nursing.
