Welcome to this episode of the NLN podcast Nursing EDge Unscripted the Surface Track and thank you for joining us. This episode is entitled, Celebrating the Year of the Nurse Educator Building Consortiums for Stronger Connections, where we will discuss one example of how educators can design and sustain initiatives
that bring educators together. These connections strengthen and empower groups of educators to advance evidence-based teaching strategies to reach learners and to help build their expertise and practice. And to help us today, we have a very special guest, Dr. Monique Davis serves as the collegewide instructional dean of the health services and director of nursing at Montgomery College in Tacoma Park, Maryland. Dr. Davis has been a registered nurse
for 20 years. She serves the nursing community in areas related to women and children's health. She has over eight years of nursing education experience. These experiences include working as a clinical instructor, professor both in the classroom and online instruction. She is passionate about educating students within the health sciences discipline. She's an advocate for the use of technology to enhance the educational experiences of nursing students. Welcome Monique.
Thank you for joining us. Monique, it is so great to have you here. Thanks for joining us on this conversation. I'm really excited to be with you all today. Thank you for inviting me and I'm really excited to talk about all the wonderful consortium experiences we have going on at Montgomery College and in the state of Maryland. Absolutely. So I think a great place to kick us off and start is really what the consortium is all about, a little bit of its background and its
history. I think it's really awesome that you've been with it since the very beginning. And you have a really unique perspective to share. So I'm curious to hear more about it. Absolutely. So, the Maryland Clinical Simulation Resource Consortium, which we affectionately call MCSRC, we received our initial funding in fiscal year 2015. It was
a five-year grant. We received over $3.1 million to provide simulation, education, best practices, and to purchase equipment, materials, and supplies for the 23 prelicensure nursing programs in the state of Maryland. The funding source of that of those millions of dollars came from the Health Services Cost Review Commission which is also affectionately known as HSCRC. So many acronyms
in the state of Maryland. And so, there is state legislation that requires each of our hospitals to provide 0.1% of their annual revenue, to be dedicated specifically to nursing education. So, a portion of those funds go directly back to the hospitals for hospital-based nursing education programs. And in the state of Maryland, all of our hospitals participate in a nurse residency program. So funding can go towards that. It can go to professional development. It can go towards
tuition reimbursement. All of those things at the hospital level. The additional funds are provided to the colleges and universities as a competitive grant process. So each of the 23 prelicensure programs can apply for grant funds to support initiatives that are relevant for nursing education in academia. So again, 0.1% of the revenue comes from the healthcare cost review commission. Those funds come from the hospital. It's a requirement. Each hospital has to pour
into nursing education. Those funds are then given to Maryland Higher Education Commission, which is MHEC. And so MHEC manages those grant funds. So Montgomery College is extremely fortunate to have been chosen as the host school to run the MCSRC. So we were invited to host the consortium for
simulation. The University of Maryland School of Nursing at the same year received funding to run a leadership cohort that would affect all of the prelicensure programs for faculty development and training specific to nursing education leadership. So Montgomery College was running the simulation portion of it. And so over the first five years of that grant, I served as the program director.
Sabrina Beroz, which she's been very involved in our simulation community, was our first faculty lead and the responsibility of the faculty lead is to make sure that all of our curricula, all of our activities that we're providing. We have a phenomenal simulation library where we record, produce, and have our simulations up on the website in the open domain for others to use and I'll put a shameless plug there because they
were used quite a bit during the pandemic. And so, we were just very happy as a college and as a consortium that we were able to have these simulation experiences in place long before they were actually needed. So that's how the structure is for our consortium. I'm the
program director. As the program director, my responsibility is to oversee all of the finances, to oversee all of the grant reporting, to make sure that we're disseminating information, to make sure that we're surveying and gathering all the information that's relevant for the program to continue and for the program to grow. So, that's kind of the back history of it. So, we were fortunate to receive a renewal of the five-year grant in fiscal year 2020. And we received just
a little over $2 million. The funds for the next five years that we're currently in is specific just to professional development, training, and the workshops and things that we're offering. So, the first five years, we purchased simulation equipment, materials, and supplies. For the next five years, because all of the schools received equipment, material, supplies, we have not needed to provide funding for those moving forward.
Monique, that is fantastic. And you know, I also appreciate you sharing sort of how the funding was used to support this project in its first five years and now how it's kind of being scaffolded to go beyond the basics. Right. So whenever we think about Maslow's Hierarchy, we're like we need food and water
and basic right sustenance. But and that's kind of what it seems like that first five years was like, let's get equipment and some professional development and really connect simulation to the evidence for teaching. And now it sounds like you guys these next five years are really, you're really extending beyond to reach more people with that professional development piece. Absolutely training. And so the focus in the first five years was really on in terms of
education and professional development. It was for academics and for our hospital partners. And so if you were a staff educator or someone in the hospital, many of our hospitals have simulation centers so that they can onboard their new f their new staff as well as to do their annual trainings. And so we wanted to include them so they could have best practices with the fundamental pedagogy of simulation as well as how to implement it and
how to evaluate it. Fortunately for our academic partners they were recipients of the equipment but the hospitals were not. So because we saw that there was a greater need in academic settings for that simulation equipment and materials and things like that. Yeah that's fantastic. And you know when you think about this you know kind of the theme we have sort of two themes for this
conversation. One of which is the consortium piece of really creating this collective body of nurse educators and partners and even probably interprofessionals on some level to create this network where people can share resources access resources, get development really to help move their programs forward and really ultimately make better graduates. Right. Yes. To do this better handoff to the hospitals and our clinical
partners. The other part of this conversation, the theme really is around celebrating the year of the nurse educator. And I think what better way to celebrate that than really discuss this part these partnerships and these collaborative efforts
in the form of a consortium. Yeah. So I'm just wondering if you can just share a little bit about how in your in your view in your perspective, how you think these this consortium really helps to celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of the nurse educator kind of from a broad perspective. Absolutely. So well the first
thing is we have such great power in numbers. So, if if we're going out and if it's some something as simple as working with a vendor to say, "I would like to purchase a piece of equipment." If I'm going to that vendor and saying, "I need 23 pieces of equipment versus I need one." We can definitely get a better deal. We can get a lot more resources. We can get better warranties because we're doing this as a collective with others. So that was one of the huge benefits.
faculty and staff within our academic settings and our hospital-based educators. We were able to identify what are the best practices, what is the pedagogy with simulation, what equipment materials are needed. So we were looking in and tapping into that expertise, but then we needed to work together to make sure that we could operationalize it. So as we worked together the first step was to make sure that we had the infrastructure in place and we had the
funding. So we built the consortium and the beauty of our consortium is that we also have a steering committee and with our steering committee we made sure that we have representation from every region within the state of Maryland because Maryland is a unique state. We have the eastern shore, we have the western where our mountains are. We have very
urban areas and then we have very rural areas. So we wanted to make sure that we had on our steering committee representation from each of the regions of the state. We also wanted to make sure that we had representation not just from our community colleges but from our university partners as well. And in the state of Maryland, we have public institutions, we have private institutions, we have predominantly white institutions, we have historically black colleges and universities, and
then we have our community colleges. So we also made sure that we had those representatives on our steering committee so that every place whether it's a hospital or it's an academic institution that we had a voice so that the consortium could have equal representation. So when you look at building a initiative like this you want to make sure at the foundational level that you have the team in place that can put this work together because again one or two people cannot possibly
do this heavy work on their own. So to have, you know, the steering committee, to have buy-in from all of our university partners and our hospital affiliates and from our community college representatives, it's just been invaluable for us. And so once we all got together, sat in a room, hey, this is what we're going to do. It's going to benefit all of us. We had very, very little trouble getting by in. Everyone was on board. And the steamboat just kept going and the train just
kept going. We were just so excited about how we were able to roll out courses, how we were able to go onsite to our schools and to our hospitals to offer workshops that were tailored just for their needs. So I mean it's just been it's been an amazing journey because again we're doing this as a collective versus just looking at it individually. So and that and that's the beauty of a nurse educator. a nurse educator rolls up their
sleeves and they say, "Hey, I'm here. I'm bringing my expertise and as I'm working with students and I'm working with my colleagues, everyone's bringing their best." So, at the end of the day, what we really care about is providing skilled, qualified nurses at the bedside, in people's homes, wherever there's a need for nurses. And as we know, there is a humongous nursing shortage.
And so, I'm so fortunate that the consortium has been in place because none of us had predicted the pandemic was going to come in the way that it did. Many of us thought, oh, we'll be out of school for two weeks and then it ended up being almost two
years. And so to be able to use simulation whether it's in person or virtual whether it was to do in-person lectures or to do virtual lectures to have our consortium in place to have a lot of those resources even before the pandemic hit and having our state tapped into those resources. There was a small learning curve so that those you know educational experiences did not have to stop. nursing education did not have to stop during the
pandemic. We were able to continue on and I mean it's just the resiliency of the nurse educator to make, you know, when life gives lemons, we make some sweet lemonade. So, yep. I love it. You know, and hearing you talk about the consortium, it's clear that it's a huge asset to the state, but I can also imagine that there's some benefits of this consortium that folks outside of the state can tap into. you mentioned earlier having some
cases and some resources online. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more for our listeners who may not be in the state and directly benefit from the initiatives but could tap into some of the insights or some of the resources that you all have curated for the state that could be applicable to where they are outside
of the state of Maryland. Absolutely. So it's just www.montgomerycollege.edu/MCSRC and that's our website to get to all of our resources on our website and we have a link to our sim library right there on that website and so it has been phenomenal how people have used the resources for their doctoral dissertations they have used the resources to augment and be a supplement for their curriculum not a week goes by where I don't hear from an entity across the country.
I've received feedback from schools in Canada in India. Our faculty leads went to do a conference in India to talk about simulation best practices and what's happening. I mean it's just been phenomenal to know that this is something that's happening in Maryland, but it's an open access resource. So there is no charge for anyone to use our resources. We have all of the instructional material that go along with the simulation
accessible online in PDF form as well. So, again, it's just the hard work that has gone into this this project is just phenomenal. And then just to have the response of people finding value and utilizing it, it's just been amazing. That is really inspirational. sincerely and you know another question I have is about kind of looking forward to the like future in that how do you think this initiative and this consortium can really help to meet the needs of you know our next
generation of learners. Sure. So one of the first things that we do as a consortium, our steering committee meets very regularly throughout the year and part of it is just having those specific questions and not just having the questions within our steering committee but we partner with our hospitals in Montgomery County we have an entity called Nexus Montgomery and it's a consortium of all the hospitals in the in the county and we work very closely with them to see what their
needs are. So how many new nurses do you need to hire? What do those skill sets need to be? What is it that you all are seeing as a collaborative or as a consortium at the hospital level? What is it that we can tap into so that we can then meet the faculty and staff needs and then meet the
needs of the students? So that's one one area. The other area is that at Montgomery College we have a unique partnership with Holy Cross Health and that to my knowledge we are the only community college in the country that has a hospital on its campus which is a phenomenal thing for us as a community college. But we have that that unique relationship that we can have those conversations very openly and we can see firsthand because the hospital is
on our campus. We're able to see what those needs are as the technology is changing in the clinical arena, as the professional development needs are growing and expanding. And so what we did learn during the pandemic was that the resiliency of the nurse and figuring out what the demands of the nurse are not just related to hands-on skills. It's also the emotional intelligence
that needs to go into it. And so, how best can you put someone in a situation that they've never been in and still keep them safe other than in
simulation? So, we were able to tap into doing those role plays and doing those scenarios in a in a simulated safe environment where we really not focused in on can you insert a Foley catheter or can you insert an NG tube, but what do you have to do when your patient is there, their family cannot come in to see them, you have on all of your personal protective equipment, you have to cluster your care, you have to think about all of that emotional intelligence that you need to
really still provide that compassionate care. So, as we talk about simulation and we talk about in-person sim or even virtual sim, we have to make those connections not just to those tactile skill development, but also just what do you have to do when you're supposed to be socially distanced with your patient and you have your PPE on and your patient feels so isolated. How do you still provide that compassionate care? The other area that we tap into with our consortium is we talk
with our academic partners. And so again, we have our steering committee, but we also have in the state of Maryland, we have our deans and directors group where they meet quarterly. And in that group, it's all of our university and community college deans and directors. We meet to talk about what are the unique needs within our state that have to specifically do with academia. So, we're getting information from our hospital partners. We're getting information from our sister
institutions. And we also have a the Maryland Association of Associate Degree Nursing Directors, which is MAADN. And so that's the 16 community colleges. And so the deans and directors that represent the community colleges, we meet on a monthly basis as well. So, as we're tapping into our MCSRC consortium, we're tapping into our deans and directors group, we're tapping into our MAADN
group, we're tapping into our hospitals. So, as much as we can get representation and hearing what those needs are, that's how we can tailor the programs and the resources that we need to offer from the consortium. there's a ton of collaboration and communication that I think plays into a huge part of the success of what goes on in the state of Maryland. And so I commend you on all the work that you all have done in moving simulation based nursing education
forward. You know as I listen and reflect on this conversation I think there may be listeners out there who are thinking about or wanting to establish a consortium where they are. I know a lot of states already have simulation consortiums, but I think a lot of folks out there are looking to establish consortiums for other reasons such as interprofessional education or student success or practice readiness or just in general building partnerships between entities that are typically
siloed, right? Academia and practice. And so for those folks and expanding our scope here, I'm curious to hear what are some lessons learned that you would share with them, some landmines. One of my favorite questions to ask when I build programs or I'm involved in it is to go to people who have walked that path and say, "What do you wish you had known when you started out?" And what would you share with someone walking this path now? There's always landmines and what are
they? And so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think the biggest piece of it is, you know, you're always going to have the unknown unknowns. So you cannot ever prepare for the unknown unknowns. But what you can prepare for is to connect with people who are doing the work
that you want to do. So in the state of Maryland, we have another affinity group, the Maryland Organization of Nurse Leaders, MONL, is what they're called, and it's usually the nursing deans and directors are invited to participate in this group, but it's really the chief nursing officers of the hospitals in the state of Maryland. And so looking at our nurse residency collaborative is a perfect example of that program. So we had our our Maryland Clinical Resource Consortium. We now
have our nurse residency collaborative. And it's again looking at the successes of what these other consortiums have done. Looking at what models they have put in place. How did you build your steering committee? How did you develop what your goals and your outcomes are going to be? What's your strategic plan going to be? And again talking with people who are already doing that work so that you're not reinventing the wheel. We do not
need to start these things from scratch. But we need to, you know, really tap into and everyone that is involved in consortiums that I've talked to in other areas, whether it's in Texas or it's in Oregon or it's in Kansas or Kentucky, they are always so willing and ready to share what it is that they're doing. And just like with us with our MCSRC, whatever knowledge we have, we put it on our website. We make sure that, you know, it's open and free for the public domain.
Because we ultimately if one of us win we all should be winning. If all of if one area is having great success and I can replicate that then I should be trying to do that. So I think that's the biggest lesson learned is just to be willing to be open to ask for help, to be willing to hear what those best practices are. Even though you may not adopt all of those best practices, but you have something in your toolkit
that you can use and move forward. You know, Monique, there's something that you said that really resonated with me and it it keeps coming up for me is when you talked about the unknown unknowns, right? the things that we don't know are around the corner. We didn't know a pandemic was happening. Yeah. We only knew it when it was
upon us very quickly. And then connecting that back to what you said earlier in the conversation about how this consortium, this collective body of nurse educators was so well established before the unknown unknown came about. Yeah. and how that really gave you got gave everyone such an opportunity to to respond quickly and it made that learning curve or you know smaller and it it and you were able to overcome barriers
more quickly and more readily. these partnerships really can help us I think mitigate and respond to the unknown unknowns a lot quicker and I think that just I think is a is a wonderful takeaway for me personally but I also think for our listeners that establishing these networks can really help us overcome a lot of what we're not even sure what's going to happen absolutely a lot of unknown and that was really true with our MCSRC we had an established connection with all of our
academic partners and our hospital partners. So, when the pandemic hit and we were all like, "Okay, it's going to be more than two weeks that people are going to not be able to go to the hospital for clinical. It's not it's going to be a little while before students can physically
go back on campus. What type of education and support need to happen?" and our faculty leads for our MCSRC, Jasline Moreno and Raquel Bertiz, they went right into action and before I could even blink, they were hosting focus groups and just helping faculty and hospital-based educators to come online to vent to talk about, hey, this is what's happening in my institution. People are scared, they're quitting, they're so we had that safe space that we could react quickly.
So, and the people were aware of each other. so that that space was already safe. So they could come in and say, "Hey, this is the problem that I'm experiencing. Are you experiencing this at your place? What are you doing about it?" The word that's coming to mind in hearing this is agility. Yes. And you know, I think as nurses in clinical settings, we like to pride ourselves on being agile and flexible and, you know, turning on
a dot. I'm trying to avoid the word pivot because I think we've, you know, beaten that word to death over, you know, the last two years. But we pride ourselves. But then when we take those nurses and we put them into academia, man, we hold on so tight to the way things have always been done and we're not so agile anymore. Like one of the most dangerous phrases in nursing education is because
it's always been done that way, right? Yep. And so what I hear is that having all of these having these collective bodies, these different perspectives, the seats around the table, making sure there's representation around the table and people have a voice helps enable agility and moving quickly towards best practices and responding to the external factors that are around us. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm thinking it might be time to ask some rapid fire questions. Okay. Get
to know you a little bit better. Okay. All right. So, first question. If you were to write a memoir, what would you title the book? Sure. So, I just recently went to Curacao. It was 11 of us in my family unit. 11 ladies in my family, four generations, my grandmother, my mother, myself, and my daughter and we all went for Mother's Day to go to Curacao. And so in Curacao they
their native language is Papiamentu. They speak Dutch and they speak English and Spanish and French and so they speak a lot of languages there. But Papiamentu is their language and they have a phrase or word that's dushi, d-u-s-h-i, Dushi and it means everything that's good. Everything that if you have a good event like today we're having a great webinar, I would say this is dushi. If we had went to lunch and the food was delicious,
they would say dushi. And so if I had to name my memoir, I would call it Dushi's Journey. because life does give you some some sad days, but if you look at your life in totality, you're always looking for the joys and the goods of things and the goods truly always outweigh the bad. So I would call it Dushi's Journey. That is awesome. Rachel, I don't know about you, but I'm putting that word in my pocket and I'm pulling that out. So what is on the top of your
reading list right now for fun? Oh, for fun? Well, I don't know if it's necessarily for fun, but Viola Davis has a new book out called Finding Me, and so I've been kind of thumbing through it. I haven't been able to really do a deep dive and dissect it other than kind of thumbing through it. But I really like reading about others memoirs. You know, Michelle Obama's Becoming was such
a phenomenal book. So, as I hear and read about others and their memoirs, so I thought it was quite funny that the first question was like, what would I name my memoirs? But right now, I'm I have Viola Davis's Finding Me at the top of the list. That's great. You know, that same book keeps coming up on my for you list. So, now I'm gonna I'm gonna hit on it for sure. So, thank you. What is your favorite quote? Sure. So, I don't know who this quote is from. It's an
anonymous quote. But it says, "I love you. You You're probably thinking you don't even know me. But if people can hate for no reason, I can love." So that is powerful. It is. It really is. And so I see myself as a servant leader here at my place of employment and the work that I do in my community. And in order to be a servant leader, you are yes, taking care of yourself, making sure your cup is full that you can then pour into the lives
of others. But it is my sole focus to make sure that I'm pulling those behind me and pulling those who walk beside me to help meet them meet their goals and their objectives in life. And so again, you don't necessarily have to know someone to love them. Because if hey, if people can hate, I can love. So yep. So good. That is so good. Yeah. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be? So, I'm going to
go way back, way back. You know, I thought about, you know, some of the most famous people and, you know, that are living and I thought about some people who have gone on. And I would like to tap into a nurse who became a nurse in 1879, Miss Mary Eliza Mahoney. It's with on her shoulders I do stand. And so, she is the first African-American
nurse. And so I would really like to sit and talk with her and just to hear what her journey was like and you know how she took the principles of Florence Nightingale and then just made a lovely career of her own. So yeah that is wonderful. Well you know this entire conversation Monique has I said it before and I'll say it again has been sincerely inspirational. I feel like I've learned some really fantastic things and things I can take with me into my own nursing education practice,
into my work, into my into my world. So, thank you so much. I'm grateful. Awesome. I'm delighted to be here with you all. And again, this is the year of the nurse educator and I would encourage anyone who's considering being a nurse educator to to jump two feet in. It's worth it. You're not just changing the life of just your students, but you're changing the lives of the
lives that your students will touch. And so when I realized that one day that as a nurse, I knew I could care for my four or five patients. I was a pediatric nurse. I did hematology oncology and enrolled expand and did, you know, mother baby and labor and delivery and all of those things. And I could impact the patients lives, those four or five patients I would have each day. But then when I became a clinical instructor, I had eight students and they had four or five
patients. And so that particular day, we were impacting the lives of some 40 patients. And now that you know when you're in academia and you have a class full of a hundred students and you have now that I'm the dean of health sciences and director of nursing, I have 500 nursing students. And I think about how they're impacting not just their family's lives, but the lives of
the people they're touching in the community. And so if you're thinking about it, you want to be a nurse educator, I implore you, please connect with your local university, your un your local community college. There is a great need for nurse educators. And you don't have to know it all. You don't even have to, you know, know much. We will train you and prepare you so that you can be the best educator to meet the needs of those students
in your area. It takes a special person to be a nurse and it takes an even special person to be a nurse educator. I think that is beautifully said. Thank you so much. It has been a joy having you in our conversation today. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. Yep. Shameless plug to get more nurse educators. Thank you. It's a rally call. Yes, it is. Absolutely. I hope everyone's coming. We need them. Yep. Absolutely. So, thank you all so much. I appreciate the time.
Thank you for joining us on this episode of NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Surface. We hope you join us next time. Until then, remember, whether your water is calm or choppy, stay connected, get vulnerable, and dare to go beneath the surface.