September 4, 2009
 

A letter from the APNF. Hmmmm. What can they want? Money!! I just got home from a difficult day—helping more than one patient, heck, more than a dozen, cope with all the dimensions of a serious issue—and APNF wants me to give more? I gave—I give—at the office!


Yes, you do. Without excessive pay or even recognition commensurate with your contribution.

That is precisely why the American Psychiatric Nursing Foundation is seeking your help. Your charitable money can go many worthy places, but nowhere else will it further your own efforts more and respect them so specifically.

“We’re the only organization really trying to lead priorities of psychiatric and mental-health nursing research and get the next generation into it,” says Linda Beeber, who chairs the APNA’s Research Council and helps evaluate the grant applications. “We’re so very good at adapting to community settings where other disciplines aren’t that comfortable. I’d really like to see a new generation that would show what psychiatric and mental-health nursing really can do. We’ve gotten overlooked in a number of critical places.”

Enough with the low profile. The APNF, through your generosity, wants to magnify our nurses’ abilities and highlight their crucial efforts across the land.

What’s the Big Deal?

APNF annual awards are modest: $5,000. That’s what makes the outsize results so rewarding. With that money, researchers can compensate subjects for their time; defray transportation costs; hire translators, interpreters and transcribers; and obtain the special software or copyright materials necessary for qualitative research.

With these small grants, researchers carry out what they have proposed in well-reasoned, scientifically rigorous proposals. Our panel of judges not only rates the applications but also gives valuable feedback.

“Membership can offer enrichment,” Beeber points out. “They have great ideas. Our applicants need access to a doctorally prepared practitioner. We’ll donate that. We need the funds for research.” Otherwise, she observes, those who want to advance our profession swim with “very large sharks” in the pool for grants from large institutions.

“Getting funded by the APNF made a really important project possible,” declares Kathryn Anderson, Ph.D. She was one of five recipients of the foundation’s $5,000 grants in 2008. That amount “isn’t a lot of money, but it’s made the difference for me to get this project off the ground—or not.”

Like other grantees, Anderson has to refer to her files for the project’s exact title. Its mission, however—to examine attitudes, beliefs, values and risk factors in Hispanic, African and black Caribbean couples coping with breast cancer and looking at depression—fills her heart. And it takes a lot of heart to fit all that in.

Psychiatric and mental-health nurses typically have that heart, of course. It leads them to the profession, which leads them to search for better solutions, which leads us to you.

Who Else Will Do It?

With your support, we can underwrite another group of projects in 2010. “Others aren’t going to do it for us,” Beeber notes. “We’ll have to build our own cadre.”

Beeber herself is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who focuses on research. She started a program that, throughout North Carolina, enables psychiatric nurse practitioners to intervene with depressed mothers.

Ursula Kelly, a 2008 grantee, is finishing a post-doctoral fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill. Kelly conducted a feasibility study of group psychotherapy intervention for Latinas who have symptoms of PTSD as a result of abuse by an intimate partner. Along with a nurse practitioner who used the research as the capstone project for her DNP, Kelly involved several nurse practitioner students as research assistants.

“The grant has been a blessing,” she confirms. “Otherwise, it would have been hard to hire both a translator and an interpreter, even at the discounted rate.” After interviews with three groups of varied—sometimes homogeneous, sometimes not—ethnic makeup, Kelly sees a remarkable finding—that the shared experience of abuse is far more binding than ethnic identity.

“The research that we’re doing is intended to have very direct clinical implications rather than being this distant academic exercise,” she says. “Psychiatric nurses want nothing more than to help people heal, and if we find ways to do this, we’ll be successful in our goal. Hopefully [my work] will provide some guidance. We’re working with very challenging populations. Very, very little research has been done [in this area].”

When you are part of the equation, APNF can help meet these challenges—and others.

Where the Needs Are

What is more challenging than being the parent of child with behavioral issues? Eileen Cormier, Ph.D., is pioneering research at the Florida State University School of Nursing on how parents make decisions over time about medication to treat their child’s ADHD symptoms. With a clinical background in family therapy, Cormier and a colleague are beginning to collect data, thanks to her 2009 grant.

“I’ve always had a concern, and ethical concern, of medications’ effects on growing bodies,” Cormier says. “What kind of information would help make this decision over time? How important has it been to counsel parents?” Having worked in her native Canada, Cormier is addressing the challenges of the U.S. health-care system, where care and follow-up vary with insurance plans, and of the young patients’ range of settings and attitudes.

Such an inquiry is not a tidy affair. Besides insight, it entails interviews, which require transcribing, and analysis for common themes, which requires costly software.

Beeber contends that this project exemplifies where psychiatric and mental health nurses shine: in areas where a practitioner can guide patients through ambiguities to the right decision. It’s up to APNF to ensure that these projects go forward.

On the Mark

Mary Rosedale sees her work as not only practical but also cutting edge. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or RTMS, to treat depression within months of her winning her 2008 APNF grant to explore the technique’s efficacy. Rosedale sees great potential for this “novel form of brain stimulation, using magnetic fields to apply current to focally stimulate the cortex and depolarize neurons.” It offers the prospect of fewer side effects than drugs and advantages over electroconvulsive shock therapy. “It primes the brain so patients have better response to antidepressants,” she adds.

A professor of nursing at New York University who engaged an undergraduate nursing student in her research, Rosedale looks forward to publishing her findings in JAPNA and conducting a workshop on brain stimulation at APNA’s national conference in October.

Pay It Forward

As the foregoing shows, an investment in APNF’s grant program yields terrific returns. An obvious one is pilot projects with great potential to attract large grants based on intriguing results. Another is more time-released: entrants to our field who share in the excitement of a well-planned—sometimes even an improvised—effort and “catch the bug.”

“Florida International University is 86 percent ethnic minorities,” Kathryn Anderson notes, and her seven students involved with the project covered those in the study. Even before all the data came in, she had a payoff: “A Haitian student getting her master’s in nursing as a family practitioner told me, ‘I never thought about the issues that my effect my people before, never had any interest in research, but now it’s going to change how I look at my nurse practitioner practice.’”

These days, the government has paid up to $4,500 for clunkers, the better to clean the air and spur the economy. For $500 more, APNF is seeding projects likely to grow into powerful tools for patient care, career-changing inspiration for young researchers and career-affirming incentives for established practitioners. It takes us a whole lot farther than bucket seats, mag wheels and two tons of metal ever can.

So, by all means, relax after yet another challenging day. Then, please give a little more so we can do justice to all the good you do.

Our Strength in Numbers

APNA is 6,000 members strong. APNF grant recipients will multiply any donation you make. These grants may not “change the world,” but they’ll change someone’s world: a depressed mother recovering from substance abuse; a nursing student who never imagined she could make a difference through research; a 60-year-old assistant professor who brings decades of experience to her subject, her subjects and her students.

You see? Your help will build data, connections and respect for our profession, one $5,000 grant at a time.

Please give what you can. You can count on a great return.

Sincerely,

Jane A. Ryan RN, MN, CNAA
President, Board of Trustees
American Psychiatric Nursing Foundation