This normally is a busy time of year for Pitt Nursing’s graduating Doctor of Nursing Practice students. That busyness intensifies when a pandemic with unprecedented situations and ramifications enters the picture.
April Adley has kept moving. A DNP student in Pitt Nursing’s Health Systems Executive Leadership program, Adley also is the vice president of nursing services, Children’s Hospital and Women’s Health, at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. In that role, she is a driving force for their COVID-19 response, and has been spending much of her time in the medical center’s command center.
Cue last week. Adley’s capstone project presentation was scheduled for March 27.
Adley went home after work, and made the finishing touches on her project, “Unboxing Joy: A Revolutionary Bundle to Decrease Nurse Manager Burnout.” Then, on March 27, she left the command center, presented her project … and went right back to work.
Her DNP project served to establish programs focused on creating “joy” in the workplace for nurses and nurse managers. Adley’s quality improvement project evaluated evidenced-based joy strategies, presented as a bundle, against nurse manager burnout and intent to leave.
Adley is using the burnout prevention techniques that she developed on frontline staff who are currently caring for COVID-19 patients.
Last year, Adley not only received FEMA training at the Center for Domestic Preparedness in Alabama, but she also was honored as one of central Pennsylvania’s most influential women of 2019.
We are proud to call Adley a Pitt Nurse.