By Lynn Schultz-Writsel
Thanks to a $450,000 grant from the international Kentrik Group, the Hopkins-based online community for global nursing and midwifery will be able to expand its reach to nurses in far-flung, underserved communities around the globe.
“Many of the world’s most pressing health issues are occurring in places where access to best practices and knowledge resources are very low,” explains assistant professor Patricia Abbott, PhD, RN, FAAN. “Our online community has proven to be an effective tool in removing the constraints of geography.” Abbott is director of the Global Alliance for Nursing and Midwifery Electronic Community of Practice (GANM CoP), an innovative and highly successful worldwide online community of practice for care providers in diverse and frequently poorly accessible practice settings throughout the world.
With the grant from the Kentrik Group, an international investment company, the GANM CoP seeks to expand its global outreach efforts and to create specific learning modules and online teaching materials for health care practitioners in diverse settings.
“This fund is critically important to ensuring the GANM’s forward momentum in using information and communication technologies to ‘reach and teach’ geographically dispersed nurses and midwives,” says Abbott. “The emergence of the Kentrik Group as a supporter of global nursing and midwifery has arrived at a crucial time in global health. We know that the marked worldwide decline and migration of the nursing workforce has reached crisis levels. Now we can address one of the root causes of the nursing and midwifery migration: isolation and marginalization.”
The GANM CoP is based at the school in the Institute for Johns Hopkins Nursing PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing Knowledge, Information Management, and Sharing (KIMS). It reaches a membership of 1,300 nurses, midwives, public health practitioners, and policy makers from 118 countries.