Congrats to Woman of Impact, Dr. Bernadette Melnyk! AACN Honors Ohio State’s Melnyk for Her Work Advocating for Evidence-Based Nursing Practice
Kate Dickerson
The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) honors Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, PhD, RN, APRN-CNP, FAANP, FNAP, FAAN, with a 2018 AACN Pioneering Spirit Award.
This AACN Visionary Leadership Award recognizes significant contributions that influence high-acuity and critical care nursing and relate to the association’s mission, vision and values. The presentation will occur during the 2018 National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition, Boston, May 21-24.
Melnyk is professor and dean of the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University (OSU) and professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at OSU’s College of Medicine. She also serves as the university’s vice president for health promotion and chief wellness officer.
Recognized nationally and globally for her clinical knowledge and innovative approaches to a wide range of healthcare challenges, Melnyk has been instrumental in the adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP).
“Thanks in large part to Dr. Melnyk’s work, nursing has become more supported by modern scientific knowledge and less rooted in traditions that may be outdated,” said AACN board president Christine S. Schulman, MS, RN, CNS, CCRN-K. “She has inspired nurses around the world to provide more effective care and improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes through evidence-based practice.”
Her record as principal investigator includes over $36 million in sponsored funding from federal agencies and foundations, and her findings have helped document that EBP leads to a higher quality of care, improved population health outcomes, decreases in costs and empowerment of clinicians.
Under her leadership, OSU launched the Helene Fuld Health Trust National Institute for Evidence-based Practice in Nursing and Healthcare in 2017. The Fuld Institute is a national hub for the dissemination, teaching and creation of best practices to improve healthcare quality, safety, costs and patient outcomes. Melnyk serves as the institute’s founding executive director. Her evidence-based programs are being used throughout the world to improve outcomes for critically ill children, premature infants and their parents.
She founded the National Interprofessional Education and Practice Collaborative to advance the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Million Hearts Initiative to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2022. The collaborative now has more than 150 participating academic institutions and organizations throughout the United States. She also founded a new national organization, the National Consortium for Building Healthy Academic Communities, for which she served as its first president.
Melnyk is an editor of five books and has authored more than 315 publications; she also received two Book of the Year awards from American Journal of Nursing. She is a frequent keynote speaker and has consulted with hundreds of healthcare systems and academic institutions throughout the nation and world on how to implement EBP.
Prior to joining OSU in 2011, Melnyk was dean and distinguished foundation professor in nursing at the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at Arizona State University. She also was a professor at her alma mater, the University of Rochester in New York, for several years, with faculty appointments to the School of Nursing and School of Medicine & Dentistry. Additional roles included serving as Rochester’s associate dean for research and director of the Center for Research and Evidence-Based Practice and the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Program. Her nursing career began as a critical care nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner at hospitals and in private practice in Pennsylvania and New York
Melnyk earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from West Virginia University, a Master of Science with a specialization in nursing care of children and pediatric nurse practitioner from the University of Pittsburgh, and a PhD in clinical research from the University of Rochester – where she also completed a post-master’s certificate as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner.
This article originally appeared on on Newswise.