Newswise — Winter 2012 marks the final installment of Johns Hopkins Nursing’s three-issue series, “Nursing’s Blueprint for the Future,” which explores the impact of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 2010 report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. This issue highlights two of the report’s eight recommendations, exploring how new data collection methods affect the future of the nation’s nursing workforce and illustrating what hospitals, nursing schools, and nurses are doing to create a culture of lifelong learning. Recommendation #6: Ensure that nurses engage in lifelong learning. These days, every nurse is a lifelong learner. Technology is moving too fast to think otherwise, with in-service meetings to discuss new devices, drugs, and procedures as common as deliveries of fresh scrubs. But what happens when everyone involved in nursing education—from accrediting bodies to continuing education programs on down—unites to create an atmosphere where nurses are motivated to go beyond in-service seminars and mandatory orientation to a place of personal and professional gain? Recommendation #8: Build an infrastructure for the collection and analysis of interprofessional healthcare workforce data. With a nursing shortage that could reach one million RN vacancies by 2020, the future of patient care relies heavily on successful workforce planning. And for that, researchers need good, hard data. But this year, the federal government gave the axe to the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, the primary source of nursing workforce data since 1977. Where will healthcare workforce data come from now, and how will it impact the future of nursing?

In “Hill’s Side,” Martha Hill, PhD, RN, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, announces her retirement, slated for the end of this academic year. “I realized I could achieve what many leaders hope will be he highlight of their career: Taking an organization to a place of preeminence, then leaving on a high note with that organization in excellent shape,” she writes. Ronald J. Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University offers his response, “Martha Hill embodies the very best of Johns Hopkins.”

More issue highlights:

Dangerous Relationship? There’s an App For That—A new mobile app, based on research by Professor Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, helps victims of relationship violence assess the threat.

Where Does a 500-Pound Sea Lion Spit?—Few humans would drool at the chance to swab the inside of a quarter-ton sea lion’s mouth, but Doug Granger, PhD, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Salivary Bioscience, sees a perfect research opportunity.

Best Fed Beginnings—New moms are successfully breastfeeding thanks to Howard County General Hospital’s nurse lactation consultants.

Nurses Told to ‘Stick It’—No matter how small the vein, it takes just one stick for nurses to insert an IV using Suburban Hospital’s new ultrasound-guided technology.

To read more, or to see past issues of Johns Hopkins Nursing, visit http://magazine.nursing.jhu.edu.

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