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Northern Illinois University

NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

June 15, 2004

NIU School of Nursing professors win grant
to enhance undergraduate curriculum in gerontology

DeKalb — Two Northern Illinois University School of Nursing professors have won a $200,000 grant from the Retirement Research Foundation of Chicago to help undergraduate nursing students learn more about caring for the aging population.

Judith Hertz and Donna Munroe start work July 1 on their two-year project to develop six interactive learning modules that present students and fellow faculty members with “meaty and coherent” case studies involving geriatric patients and a computer-based library of resources.

Hertz, a 2002-2004 John A. Hartford Foundation Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Post-Doctoral Scholar, and Munroe will link all the modules to specific courses in the school’s curriculum to ensure they become standard learning at NIU. The School of Nursing is part of the NIU College of Health and Human Sciences.

Nursing professors whose specializations lie elsewhere will easily be able to weave the information into their classes and direct students to the modules for further investigation, Munroe said. Preliminary data from their surveys of faculty and nursing majors indicate a desire to know more about health care for the elderly.

“In smaller nursing schools like ours, even having faculty with some level of expertise in gerontology can be rare. Our graduates have to be sensitive to, and knowledgeable about, the special needs of older patients,” Munroe said. “Demographics are showing that geriatric patients are going to be a principal part of their caseload. There’s really a pressing need for nurses to take care of this population.”

At least half of the patients in hospitals today are age 65 and older, and as more and more grandparents become the primary caregivers for their grandchildren, even pediatric nurses need a thorough knowledge of gerontology.

Older patients often require a continuum of care from one facility to another. Some have cognitive impairments, causing them to function different ways in different settings. Many are managing one or more chronic illnesses along medications used to treat those illnesses. Pressure ulcers and falls – and how to prevent them – are also common problems.

Each learning module will illustrate several concepts and settings, from hospitals and community-based clinics to long-term care facilities and private residences.

After the interactive case studies are developed, evaluated and loaded onto computers, students can work their way through each, analyzing the situations and making decisions when prompted.

“These cases will be complex enough to use in a variety of courses,” Hertz said.

The project is NIU’s first grant from the Retirement Research Foundation.

“It’s consistent with their goals and objectives,” Munroe said. “We communicated our ideas early on, and received feedback from them as we put the proposal together. It’s a really good match between what we thought we could do and what they were looking for.”

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