International Nursing Conference Taps Resick for Keynote

Organizers of an international nursing conference held in Seoul, Korea, invited Dr. Lenore Resick, a clinical professor in the School of Nursing, to deliver the keynote address.

The gathering, which took place at the Research Institute of Nursing Service at Seoul National University on May 31, focused on uniting the aims of education, research and service in community nursing centers and making operations in these centers practical and sustainable.

Resick, who is director of the nursing school’s Nurse-Managed Wellness Center (NMWC), has immersed herself in that topic since the NMWC began operations in 1994. Conference organizers learned of her credentials as director of one of the oldest academic nurse-managed wellness centers in the U.S. after reading her name among the authors of a study of Duquesne’s NMWC that was published in Journal of Gerontological Nursing in 2011.

U.S. community-nursing centers began in the 1970s, evolving in tandem with an expanding role in the fields of disease prevention and health promotion for advanced practice nurses. To educate advanced practice nurses, Resick said, clinical sites were needed that would enable students to focus on wellness and prevention, not just on the treatment of diseases and injuries, the focus of care seen, for example, in hospitals.

Though it was an international conference, with most attendees coming from Asian nations, Resick’s address focused on the past, present and future of nurse-managed wellness centers in the United States. Despite cultural differences, the same stresses on health care systems, she explained, in particular an aging population along with high costs, are driving the quest in Asia for sustainable nurse-managed wellness centers.

Resick, who is the Noble J. Dick Endowed Chair in Community Outreach and also serves as director the nursing school’s family nurse practitioner program, claimed that Duquesne’s lessons about NMWC sustainability are best expressed in straightforward terms. “Our NMWC has enjoyed long life because it has been supported by the community and the University and embraced by clients and volunteers,” she asserted.

Community backing, she pointed out, has included support from city officials as well as from neighborhood residents, whose willingness as NMWC clients to take responsibility for their own wellness makes both health success and program sustainability achievable. In addition, retired volunteer nurses donate their skills and time to the NMWC through a Duquesne-administered program known as RN+WIN (Retired Nurses Working in Neighborhoods).

Those factors got the NMWC running and keep it rolling, but according to Resick, a complete understanding demands appreciating the fundamental need for community nursing centers.

“For better health and for controlling health care costs, the focus increasingly is placed on wellness and disease prevention, particularly among older adults, who are not only living longer but living longer in their own communities,” Resick said. “There is a real need for centers like ours.”