High-quality health care assessment earns President's Medal

For ASU, social embeddedness is a university-wide, interactive and mutually supportive partnership with the communities of Arizona.

The President's Medal for Social Embeddedness recognizes ASU teams that have demonstrated excellence in fostering mutually beneficial partnerships with community leaders to identify a community need and to co-create and implement a solution that leads to positive social change in the community and in the research, teaching and service practices of ASU.

Nursing Performance Evaluation

Safe and high-quality health care is critically important to individuals, families and communities. A team from Arizona State University’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation (CONHI), Scottsdale Community College’s (SCC) Nursing Program and the Arizona State Board of Nursing (ASBN) has developed a testing process to support health care patient safety through assessing the continued competence of registered nurses.

The team conducted externally funded research evaluating nursing performance in simulation settings and developed a valid and reliable process of testing nurses being investigated for reports of unsafe practice.

Now, participants referred by the ASBN for performance testing provide basic nursing care to lifelike high fidelity mannequin patients within a realistic health care environment in the ASU CONHI or SCC simulation laboratories. Nurse raters review the videotaped care performances and health record documentation.

A summary of the performance findings is delivered to the ASBN investigators for use in case deliberations and remediation plans.

This collaborative Nursing Performance Evaluation process in Arizona serves as a national and international model of evidence-based nursing regulation.

Team Members
College of Nursing & Health Innovation, ASU
Debra Hagler, Beatrice Kastenbaum, Ruth Brooks, Jill Lockhart, Eric Penn, Janet O'Brien, Denise Goepfert, Teresa Hart, Mary Z. Mays, Dan Weberg

Community Partners
Arizona State Board of Nursing
Pamela Randolph

Scottsdale Community College
Carol Frazier, Janine E. Hinton, Nicholas DeFalco, Kathy Miller