Creating Case Studies for Digital Health and Technology Competency in Nursing.

BACKGROUND: Nursing programs and their faculty must ensure that graduates have the informatics, digital health, and health care technologies competencies needed by health systems. PROBLEM: A gap exists in nursing faculty knowledge, skills, and abilities for incorporating informatics, digital health, and technologies across curricula because of low focus on this area in faculty development initiatives and rapid adoption and evolution of technologies in health care systems. APPROACH: The Nursing Knowledge Big Data Science initiative Education Subgroup used a process to create case studies for including informatics, digital health, and the concomitant clinical reasoning/critical thinking competencies across curricula. OUTCOMES: Three case study examples were created using the process. CONCLUSIONS: The process for creating case studies that incorporate required informatics, digital health, and health care technologies can be used by nursing educators for teaching across their curricula and to assess student competency.

Quality Improvement of Pastoral Care for Major Depression in the Community of an African American Religious Organization.

Mental illness is a complex personal and social problem. In the African American community, cultural and ethnic stigma concerning mental illness often discourages this population from seeking the help they need. African Americans are more likely to rely on religious coping strategies such as prayer and/or informal trusted community social supports such as a senior pastor, members of a ministerial team who provide pastoral care in their churches, family members, and a limited number of friends. Implementation of a unique church-based initiative for depression/suicidality screening and stigma reduction, and collaborative efforts with community mental health providers, are promising steps toward optimizing diagnosis, treatment, follow-up for depression in African American persons in faith-based organizations. This project attempted to elaborate on and clarify the link between stigma, such as beliefs related to mental illness, and how education could influence and improve pastoral care by ministerial leaders for mental health issues in their congregants.