Amplify Nursing

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Taofiki Gafar-Schaner, co-founder of Frontier Innovation, Inc. During his experience as a bedside RN, Taofiki observed many opportunities for patient care improvement, which inspired him to launch a business focused on creating innovative healthcare products. With their SafeSeizure pads product, Frontier Health & Resources won the 2020 American Nurses Association Innovation Award, as well as the 2019 and 2020 Nightingale Innovation Awards.

Taofiki talks with us about how he became interested in nursing, the importance of drawing inspiration from bedside care, and how he navigated manufacturing and funding challenges in his journey to develop a new healthcare product.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. April Kapu, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. Dr. Kapu currently serves as the Associate Dean for Clinical and Community Partnerships at the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, where she also teaches as a professor in the DNP program.

Through her 30 years of experience in health care and nearly two decades of work as an acute care nurse practitioner, Dr. Kapu has become widely renowned as an expert in advanced practice leadership and the development of health system advanced practice infrastructure.

Dr. Kapu talks with us about how full practice authority for nurse practitioners increases access to care, utilizing technology to provide better education and care, and the importance of collaboration between nurses in advocating for the profession as a whole.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Julia Votto and Casey Cheng. Julia is a student in the Integrated Product Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania and Casey, a recent graduate from Penn Nursing’s BSN program. Julia and Casey were part of a recent collaboration between Penn’s Nursing and Design Schools, where they participated in a workflow-improvement project at Penn Medicine’s ED Pavilion using the human-centered design and design thinking skills learned in their respective programs. 

In this episode, Julia and Casey talk with us about their experiences in healthcare innovation, how they became part of the ED Pavilion collaboration, and how they were able to implement the Design Thinking process throughout the project to co-create with ED staff and clinicians to construct an impactful solution. 

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Mike Avery, Dr. Neil Ray, and Jackie Taylor. Mike is a lecturer at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Mike has worked extensively at the intersection of design, architecture, and healthcare. Neil is a physician and Clinical Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Perelman School of Medicine, with backgrounds in bioengineering, design thinking, and healthcare innovation. Jackie is an MSN-prepared nurse working at Penn Medicine Pavilion’s Emergency Department, as well as a current PhD student. The three of them recently worked together on an ED workflow-improvement project at Penn Medicine’s Pavilion Hospital, which was a joint collaboration between Penn Nursing, the Penn School of Design, and Penn Medicine.

Mike, Neil, and Jackie talk with us about how their interests in healthcare innovation led them to the Pavilion ED Project, the benefits of co-creation between students from different backgrounds, how design thinking and human-centered design can spark improvements in healthcare, and the challenges they faced as they attempted to integrate new processes in the emergency department.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. Piri Ackerman-Barger, associate dean of Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and professor at the University of California Davis Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. With a strong background in both nursing and education, Dr. Ackerman-Barger has worked extensively on the advancement of workforce diversity, education equity, and institutional sustainability throughout her career.

           Dr. Ackerman-Barger talks with us about her pathway into nursing, the challenges of addressing diversity in healthcare, the impact of stereotype threat and microaggressions on learning outcomes, and the importance of promoting not only diversity but inclusion as well.

On this special live Twitter Spaces event, Amplify Nursing podcast hosts Marion Leary and Dr. Angela DiDonato as they talk with Dr. Hernandez and Dr. Batchelor about the critical need for nurses to be more civically engaged. There has never been a more critical time for nurses to be civically engaged because when nurses are engaged, we have safer, healthier, and more equitable communities.

Follow us on Twitter at PennNursing and by using the hashtag: #PennNursingInnovation

​Alison Hernandez PhD, RN is a former 2019-2020 Health and Aging Policy Fellow turned hill staffer. You can listen to Dr. Hernandez’s Amplify Nursing podcast episode here.

Melissa Batchelor PhD, RN FNP, FAAN is a scientist, author, and speaker. She was a 2018-2019 Health and Aging Policy Fellow, serving the United States Senate Special Committee on Aging. She hosts a weekly podcast called This is Getting Old: Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Jonathan Zhu, a rising senior BSN student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. As an assistant with our Penn Nursing innovation program, Jon has worked on various projects including the Design Thinking for Health platform, Penn Nursing Innovation Accelerator, and Penn Nursing Story Slam. Jon has also participated in numerous healthcare hackathons, including NurseHack4Health, Jefferson Health Hack, MIT Health Equity, and more. Jon talks with us about what drew him to nursing and nursing innovation, the importance of innovation education in nursing curricula, and why nursing students should participate in hackathons.

Read his articles here:

The Case for Innovation Education in Nursing School

Getting Nursing Students Involved in Hackathons

On this episode of the Amplify Nursing podcast, we talk with Dr. Neil Bardhan, Director of Applied Storytelling at First Person Arts, and Christina Eskridge, founder and Executive Director of Elevate Theatre Company. Dr. Bardhan is a science communication expert with a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and he has been very involved in story slams across the country, including the Penn Nursing Story Slam. Dr. Bardhan is an expert on human communication, and his past work includes psycholinguistic research projects in The Netherlands and Germany, where he began combining science with storytelling principles. 

Christina received her Master’s Degree in Public Health from UC Berkeley and has worked over the past decade to combine her expertise in performing arts with her public health background to facilitate and amplify health/healthcare topics including the recent Penn Nursing Frontline Health Workers Digital Theater project.

Dr. Bardhan and Christina talk with us about how their backgrounds in performing arts brought them to storytelling, the reflective nature of storytelling, and the parallels between clinical practice and the theater arts. 

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. Dawn Bent, program administrator of the DNP-Nurse Anesthesia Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing. 

As a faculty at Penn Nursing, Dr. Bent has mentored numerous nursing students, and she continues to inspire and support them through the many clinical and academic rigors that they face.

Dr. Bent talks with us about the significance mentorship plays in nursing education, the parallels between athletics and leadership, and the importance of promoting diversity among nurse anesthesia faculty.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. Julie Fairman, Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Dr. Fairman is a renowned nurse historian who has made significant contributions in studying how 20th-century healthcare issues have influenced current nursing and health care trends. Her remarkable career has sparked a new paradigm for studying the history of health care and health policy, with her current research focusing on the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Fairman talks with us about the nuances involved with studying the history of healthcare, the role of nurses in addressing structural racism and social injustice, and how historical perspectives shape the landscape of healthcare practice and policy today.