School Notes: School of Nursing
January/February 2023

Yale College alumni fund professorship

Wendy Underwood Naratil ’83 and Thomas C. Naratil ’83 recently established the Wendy U. and Thomas C. Naratil Professorship in Acute Care, an endowed gift that has contributed toward unlocking the $50 million Yale Challenge during the For Humanity campaign. The inaugural clinical chair will be occupied by Nancy Banasiak, leader of the pediatric nurse practitioner–acute care specialty that debuted at YSN in the fall of 2021. The specialty prepares graduates to provide care to patients with acute, chronic, complex, and critical health conditions from infancy to adolescence. 

Online MSN program will train mental health practitioners

YSN’s first-ever online nursing education course of study is the Master of Science in Nursing Psychiatric–Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) program, which combines live online classes, asynchronous assignments, in-person clinical training, and short-term, intensive on-campus immersions in the New Haven area. The part-time program for registered nurses includes 52.5 credits hours and is designed to be completed in three years. The new initiative is a step toward addressing the country’s mental health needs. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, 150 million people in the United States live in communities facing shortages of mental health professionals. 

Study explores virtual options for real-world health gains

Associate professor S. Raquel Ramos is currently working on an NHLBI-funded, five-year, career development award study, “LEveraging A viRtual eNvironment (LEARN) to Enhance Prevention of HIV-related Comorbidities in at-risk Men who Have Sex with Men (MSM).” The work examines how a virtual environment can be used for cardiovascular disease prevention education. Specifically, her study addresses a growing cardiovascular health equity gap and is a first-of-its-kind study using a virtual environment to address modifiable, behavioral risk factors specifically in gay and bisexual men with HIV. Her study was recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Protocols.