Nursing Network

Mission Statement

The Montana Nurses Association promotes professional nursing practice, standards and education; represents professional nurses; and provides nursing leadership in promoting high quality health care.

In Montana, breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed among Montana women, accounting for 33% of new cancers each year.

Breast cancer is a disease in which cells in the breast grow out of control, and these cells can also spread, or metastasize, to other parts of the body. Breast cancer screening means checking a woman's breasts for cancer before there are signs or symptoms of the disease. Mammograms are the best method to detect breast cancer early when it is easier to treat and before it is big enough to feel or cause symptoms. The likelihood of surviving breast cancer increases when the cancer is detected at an early stage.

For women who are underinsured or uninsured, the Montana Breast & Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (MTBCCEDP) provides free mammograms, Pap tests, and follow-up diagnostics. If a woman is diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer through the MTBCCEDP, the cancer treatment is covered by Montana Medicaid.

Available through local public health departments, community health centers and medical providers across the state, The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Service’s MTBCCEDP has provided free breast and cervical cancer screenings since the late 1990s. Local public health staff enroll women and guide them through the screening process in coordination with medical offices. Find your local program here, or call 1-888-803-9343.

Medical Providers: if you are not already enrolled with our program, you can do so through the form on our website. Billing is reimbursed every two weeks through Montana Medical Billing.

DPHHS MTBCCEDP contact: Mark Wamsley mwamsley@mt.gov

The American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Nurses Foundation announced the 2024 ANA Innovation Award winners in March during a LinkedIn livestream event (youtube.com/watch?v=57HffSKvf0Q). These annual awards, sponsored by Stryker, a global medical technology company, celebrate exemplary nurse innovators who improve patient safety and outcomes. Both the Individual Nurse Award and Nurse-Led Team Award recognize innovations involving care delivery models; medical devices or products; educational interventions; new businesses, programs, or services; research; or technology.

"This year's innovation award winners tackled healthcare disparities head on by designing solutions to address the social determinants of health as well as broader representation and diversity needs across the healthcare workforce," said ANA Vice President of Nursing Innovation Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN.

Individual Nurse Award

Kwamane Liddell

Kwamane Liddell, JD, MHA, BSN, RN, is the creative mind behind the advanced technology at ThriveLink, which uses a voice-activated enrollment platform that bridges the gap between individuals and essential, yet underutilized, social programs. ThriveLink addresses the social determinants of health that affect many marginalized communities and influence health outcomes. The platform connects people to resources such as utility assistance, rental and mortgage assistance, food benefits, health insurance, healthcare programs, and more.

ThriveLink can improve access for the estimated 130 million people who currently struggle to navigate the administrative burden and complete paperwork necessary to successfully enroll in these resources. ThriveLink (available 24/7 online) offers a user-friendly experience by streamlining the tedious requirement to fill out numerous forms and by breaking through language and cultural barriers. Anyone can complete the entire application process for an assistance program in just four steps.

Nurse-Led Team Award

Wallena Gould

Wallena Gould, EdD, RN, FAAN, FAANA, a Pennsylvania State Nurses Association member, is the founder and CEO of the Diversity in Nurse Anesthesia Mentorship Program, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and advancing diversity within graduate nurse anesthesia programs. Gould and her team accomplish this via the Immersion Model for Diversifying Nurse Anesthesia Programs (Immersion Model), an evidence-based program focused on diversifying the nursing workforce. She created the model specifically for nurses of color who've been historically underrepresented as certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs).

Diversifying the CRNA profession holds promise to reduce health disparities, structural inequities, and institutional biases. The Immersion Model prepares nurses of color to be competitive applicants for graduate anesthesia programs and successful students while equipping them to provide better health outcomes for diverse populations.

The Immersion Model is the only such program that actively engages with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic-Serving Institutions Schools of Nursing. Gould and her colleagues aim to expand the model's professional events for CRNAs and replicate it for advanced practice RNs. In addition to Gould, Immersion Model team members include Mark Giles, DNP, CRNA; Tedrick Vernon III, DNP, CRNA; Victor Pareja, DNP, CRNA; Levia Sutton, MSN, CRNA; Rylee Apodaca, DNP, CRNA; Daniel Payne, MSN, CRNA; Jiale (Gary) Hu, PhD, RN, FAAN; and Nathaly Palacios, DNP, CRNA.

Learn how ANA supports and encourages nurses in advancing their ideas and innovations at nursingworld.org/innovation. Entries for the 2025 ANA Innovation Awards opened June 1, 2024.

American Nurse Journal. 2024; 19(6). Doi: 10.51256/ANJ062444

HNHN introduces an improved HealthyNurse® survey.

By: Alison Cuccia, DrPH, MSPH

The health of nurses has been a long-standing priority of the American Nurses Association (ANA), well before the pandemic pushed the issue into the public spotlight. Recognizing that nurses frequently put the needs of their patients above their own, ANA launched Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation™ (HNHN) in 2017 to support nurses on their journey to better health. One critical component of HNHN is the HealthyNurse® survey, which measures several dimensions of health and enables participants to self-assess their well-being. The survey provides a customized heat map of an individual's results, showing health risks in green, yellow, and red.

Over the years, the HealthyNurse survey also has proven valuable to researchers, who use its aggregated data and trends to understand elements of nurses' health and overall needs.

Since HNHN's inception, nurses and nursing practice have evolved. The work environment during and after the pandemic has presented new and unique challenges with negative effects on nurses' health. At the same time, nurses' expectations and perceptions of their well-being have changed. This new landscape required HNHN to evolve.

After 7 years and nearly 40,000 responses, the HNHN team looked critically at the HealthyNurse survey. Although thousands of people completed it every year, the HNHN team heard from nurses that the tool was laborious and difficult to answer. In addition, not all survey questions applied to all nurses, rendering the resulting heat map hard to understand. The heat map itself, although informative, was disorganized and gave little indication of well-being within each of the six HNHN domains. The team also realized that the survey didn't optimally capture measures of burnout, stress, anxiety, and depression. Understanding these mental health constructs among nurses matters, especially given today's post-pandemic practice and workplace environment. In addition, the survey included few standardized and validated scales, making the findings difficult to interpret and compare with other samples.

The HNHN team addressed these concerns by developing the HealthyNurse® survey 2.0. This updated survey---launched on May 30, 2024, after extensive drafting, development, and testing---uses best practices in survey design, which makes the tool easier to answer and relevant to all nurses. The survey also incorporates several validated and widely used scales for health and well-being. Automatically calculated within the instrument, these scales allow for easier comparison of results. The team intentionally designed the survey to capture nurses' experiences involving all six HNHN health domains, including mental health, physical activity, nutrition, quality of life, rest, and safety. The updated survey also aligns with the new healthy nurse definition approved by the ANA Board of Directors in February 2024 (myamericannurse.com/what-is-a-healthy-nurse).

Along with the updated survey, the team designed a new heat map, which features a sleek design, an overall snapshot of individual health, measures of success within each HNHN domain, and actionable strategies to support areas of growth.

Visit hnhn.org to access the new HealthyNurse survey. Although designed for nurses, HNHN is free for anyone to join and assess their health across the six HNHN domains. Longstanding HNHN participants can still view their results from the first iteration of the HealthyNurse survey, but they also can complete the new survey. Given the significant changes, results between the two versions aren't comparable. Log in to hnhn.org to take the new HealthyNurse survey and see your personalized, meaningful, and actionable heat map.

Alison Cuccia is research manager at ANA.

American Nurse Journal. 2024; 19(8). Doi: 10.51256/ANJ082424

Reprinted with permission from American Nurse Journal.

By American Nurses Association

In 2023, the Nurse Staffing Task Force, a collaboration between the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN), an ANA organizational affiliate, outlined five imperatives, 16 recommendations, and 65 associated actions to actualize a sustainable nursing workforce. The five imperatives the Task Force cited as essential to resolving the nurse staffing crisis include reforming work environments, innovating care delivery models, establishing staffing standards that ensure quality care, improving regulatory efficiency, and valuing the unique contributions of nurses.

In the fall of 2023, the Task Force hosted a free, five-part interactive Project ECHO® webinar series to explore these proposed initiatives. More than 2,800 individuals participated by listening to featured Task Force member presentations and joining interactive, small group discussions.

The recordings, presentation materials, and follow-up questions from all five sessions are now available for anyone pursuing solutions to the nurse staffing crisis (hubs.ly/Q02kMCmQ0).

The series opened with Linda Cassidy, PhD, APRN, CCNS, CCRN-K, strategic advocacy manager at AACN, and Sarah Delgado, DNP, RN, ACNP, clinical practice specialist in strategic advocacy at AACN, exploring the imperative around reforming the work environment. Appropriate staffing, they suggested, is inextricably linked to the health of the work environment. Creating and sustaining a healthy work environment requires deliberate effort. They added that leaders play an essential role in this regard and must have support in doing so.

Healthy work environments, Cassidy and Delgado stressed, don't just happen---they take deliberate commitment and action by leaders---and have no finish line.

In the second session, Task Force members Vicki Good, DNP, RN, CENP, CPPS, chief clinical officer of AACN, and Lesly Kelly, PhD, RN, FAAN, scholar-in-residence for the Task Force, explored the value of nurses' unique contributions to healthcare. In hospitals' pay-for-performance models, various metrics track the value nurses add through direct benefits, cost avoidance, and cost savings.

If all RNs had a unique nurse identifier, as recommended by the Task Force, these data could be mined to quantify nurses' contributions via assessments, interventions, and outcomes.

Good and Kelly also outlined the advantages of a formalized and customizable organization-wide total compensation program, another Task Force recommendation. They described six actions that organizations might consider, such as implementing creative compensation for hard-to-fill shifts.

In Session 3, presented by Kiersten Henry, DNP, ACNP-BC, CCNS, CCRN-CMC, chief advanced practice provider at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center, and Katie Boston-Leary, PhD, MBA, MHA, RN, NEA-BC, director of nursing programs at ANA, considered how innovative care delivery models could improve patient and nurse satisfaction, reduce practice pain points, and yield better outcomes.

In Session 4, Michelle Buck, MS, APRN, CNS, senior policy advisor at the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, and Zina Gontscharow, MPP, senior policy advisor at ANA, examined how federal and state advocacy and state nursing regulation and policy affect initiatives to improve nurse staffing.

The final session, presented by ANA members Sherry Perkins, PhD, RN, FAAN, president of Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center, Matthew McHugh, PhD, JD, MPH, RN, FAAN, professor and independence chair for nursing education at University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and Nancy Blake, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FACHE, FAONL, FAAN, chief nursing officer at Los Angeles General Medical Center, explored the evidence base for establishing staffing standards. They also identified ways to advocate for enforceable policies that support staffing standards and discussed strategies for implementing them.

Collectively, these sessions offer nurses strategies and tools for progress in achieving a sustainable nursing workforce.

American Nurse Journal. 2024; 19(4). Doi: 10.51256/ANJ042448

Reprinted with permission from ANA on the Frontline in American Nurse Journal.