Rutgers School of Nursing – Camden was recently awarded the New Jersey Nursing Initiative (NJNI) Award on behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The $200,000 grant will allow the school to strengthen its efforts to educate nurses in providing services to meet complex heath needs.

Rutgers School of Nursing, one of only five institutions in the state to receive the award, will use the grant to fund advancements in the university’s School Nursing Certification Program. The school plans to expand the program so that it will now include a graduate-level curriculum that will place a focus on population health.

The program expansion will allow nurses to look at health on a holistic level, in which they will transition from focusing on the health of an individual student to assessing determinants of health issues that affect those throughout communities.

Speaking on the impact that the expansion will bring, program instructor and co-writer of the grant, Joy Atkins, said, “School nurses need education in population health, as well as the advanced leadership skills necessary to work with other community leaders to change the systems, policies, and environments that influence health.”

The NJNI award supports innovative ideas to create sustainable change in nursing academia. Originally implemented to address New Jersey’s nursing faculty shortage, NJNI now focuses on encouraging nursing educators reshape curricula and clinical experience, thus enabling nurses to be better prepared in meeting emerging demands of providing community-based care.

The initiative also emphasizes the need to foster cross-sector collaboration to improve overall well-being and strengthen integration of healthy systems into communities.

Jennifer Polakowsi, deputy director of NJNI, explained how Rutgers School of Nursing will embrace the aforementioned challenges.  “Rutgers School of Nursing–Camden’s school nurse program plans to pioneer and lead the change by developing a program that will be a model to address these attributes in order to better prepare school nurses in New Jersey, resulting in improved population health of the communities they will serve.”