On December 12, the Center for Excellence in Nursing Practice held the 8th Annual Lily Kravitz Nursing Studies Award presentations. The award was established in honor of Lily Kravitz, “an individual whose life exemplified the highest ideals of caring within the nursing profession,” said her son, Arthur Kravitz, MD, of the Department of Medicine and award founder.
The event honored Joan Riley, EdD, RN, and Diane Lancaster, PhD, RN, as the 2002 awardees for their proposal Unearthing Nursing Scholarship: Understanding Nursing Practice as An Holistic Scholarly Endeavor. This winning project will study nurses’ perspectives of professional practice as a holistic scholarly experience and validate the domains of the Universal Model of Nursing Scholarship (Revisioning Nursing Scholarship (2002), published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship.
It was also announced that funding for the 2003 award will be provided by generous donations made by members of the Center for Excellence in Nursing Practice, the Development Department, as well as one grateful patient, who had spent several months at BWH. The patient honored nursing care by bequeathing a gift of $200,000 in his will, bringing the endowment to a quarter of a million dollars.
Also present at this year’s award ceremony were former Kravitz awardees, who presented on their respective projects – Sharon Kohler, RN, BSN, CRNI, presented the findings of her project IV Therapy Workload Measurement System; Rosanna DeMarco, PhD, RN, ACRN, reported on Organizational Restructuring and Newly Employed Staff Nurses in Professional Practice: A Longitudinal Study; and Rebecca Reed, RNC, MSN, reported on her project Development of a Questionnaire to Measure Socio-Economic Acuity for Ambulatory Patients. 2001 Kravitz award winner, Carolyn Hayes, DNSc, RN, reported on Deciding to withhold/ withdraw life sustaining treatment from incompetent adults following unanticipated, catastrophic illnesses: A phenomenological study of Haitian surrogate decision makers’ experiences.