Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
We have such incredible talent in the College of Nursing, and FIRE gives our faculty the chance to leverage their talent and skills.
Learn more about the Center for Faculty Innovation, Research and Education (FIRE) here.
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By Micah Mertes
Amanda Kirkpatrick, PhD, BSN’05, an endowed professor and the College of Nursing’s associate dean for research and innovation, is a national leader in distance-based simulation methods. In the early days of the pandemic, distance learning had to advance 10 years in just a few weeks, and Kirkpatrick was sought for her expertise by educators racing to upgrade their teaching models.
Kirkpatrick became an expert out of necessity before the pandemic. She wanted to incorporate more distance learners into simulations with standardized patients. She needed not only to bridge the space between students but also schedule the simulations at an hour when all could participate, usually in the evenings. She employed Zoom and other platforms to do so.
In one simulation, the students played a palliative care team to help a standardized patient with a serious heart condition make a series of difficult decisions. In another, students acted as a hospice care team providing support for a family whose mother was dying. Both scenarios involved learners from Creighton nursing, medicine, physician assistant, dentistry, pharmacy, OT, PT and chaplaincy residents from CommonSpirit Health.
Receiving the aid of the Center for Faculty Innovation, Research and Education (FIRE) and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, Kirkpatrick took her exploration of distance learning to a new level. These awards gave her the time and resources to develop new scenarios, validate them with experts and pilot them within Creighton’s palliative care curriculum.
Kirkpatrick has since created a toolkit for developing such scenarios and conducting them online, which she has shared with her Creighton colleagues and health sciences faculty around the world. FIRE, she says, made it possible.
What, in your own words, is the Center for FIRE?
Kirkpatrick: It’s an initiative that secures and distributes funds for faculty innovation. FIRE highlights the College of Nursing’s superstars. We have such incredible talent, and FIRE gives our faculty the chance to leverage their talent and skills.
How has the Center for FIRE changed the culture of research in the College of Nursing so far?
I started at the College of Nursing in 2013, and faculty were doing research then, but not at the level of what’s happening now. There’s more of it now, and it’s celebrated to a greater degree, both internally and externally, which generates a lot of excitement for our students and faculty.
Beyond supporting students and faculty, FIRE inspires them to seek further opportunities, such as donor-funded fellowships at Creighton or external opportunities, either of which can help launch them onto the national stage in recognition of their work. This is a universal change to how research is supported and embraced in the College of Nursing, achieved in just a few years.
With further support, we can be doing even more. More faculty conducting more important research that engages more future nurses in real-world opportunities that prepare them to offer even better care to their patients. FIRE has already achieved so much, yet in some ways, we’re just getting started.
Why is something like FIRE essential to faculty retention and, in turn, the quality of education we can provide our students?
FIRE addresses our mission of innovation, of being leaders, of caring for the whole person. We don’t want to see these amazing faculty members leave and continue their great work at another university. We need to show them that the College of Nursing is invested in them and has the resources to back it up. FIRE is one of our biggest, perhaps the biggest, faculty retention tools we have.
It’s going to be more important than ever. The College of Nursing is growing, and we need to grow our faculty and show them how dedicated we are to keeping them here.
You recently became the College of Nursing’s associate dean for research and innovation. You serve as the co-chair of the nationally renowned Healthcare Distance Simulation Collaborative. You were inducted as a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing, something fewer than 1% of U.S. nurses achieve. You have received multiple donor-funded awards for your research. Is all of this possible without FIRE?
I could not have done this without it and the donors who support our research.
Do you consider yourself retained by the College of Nursing?
I am absolutely retained.
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Learn more about the Center for Faculty Innovation, Research and Education (FIRE) here.
