About the Nursing Workforce Diversity Initiative
A strategic initiative of the Oregon Center for Nursing is to promote cultural competence within the nursing workforce. The long-term outcome of a more culturally competence workforce is improvement in the quality of care for all people. Culturally competent care provided by a diverse nursing workforce saves lives.

The Oregon Center for Nursing’s diversity goals are twofold:
(1) to diversify the nursing workforce in Oregon and Southwest Washington, and (2) to strengthen cultural competency best practices in the delivery of health care by nursing students and faculty, and working nurses in every setting.

The Nursing Workforce Diversity Initiative (NWDI) efforts began in Fall 2005 as the result of a regional Nursing Workforce Diversity Summit hosted by the Linfield-Good Samaritan School of Nursing. The Summit was funded by many regional health care systems, schools of nursing, public health departments, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations.

The NWDI Task Force Workgroups consist of a Steering Committee and three workgroups of dedicated nursing and health care professionals who collaboratively volunteer their time and ideas to develop proposals for projects that promote the diversity and cultural competence of the emerging and existing nursing workforce in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Together, they launched two projects, The Nursing Student Admissions Database (NSAD), and Nurturing Cultural Competence in Nursing (NCCN) program.

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Nursing Student Admissions Database Project

Nursing Student Database ProjectThe Nursing Student Admissions Database (NSAD) Pilot Project is one component of the Oregon Center for Nursing's Nursing Workforce Diversity Initiative. The aim of the NSAD Pilot Project is to begin annually collecting reliable data that describes the true number and select demographic characteristics of applicants applying to Oregon's 21 ADN programs and BSN schools in order to accurately track and report admissions and enrollment trends.

In time, it is hoped that the NSAD Project's trend data might serve as the impetus for targeted outreach to increase diversity and cultural competence in Oregon's nursing workforce as well as provide information for nursing programs/schools and policy makers about how to go about increasing nursing career pathways to target workforce training to this demand occupation while at the same time ameliorating Oregon's nursing shortage.

 

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Nurturing Cultural Competence in Nursing Project

Nursing DiversityNurturing Cultural Competence in Nursing is a two-year small-grants project developed by the Oregon Center for Nursing and a local Nursing Workforce Diversity Task Force, a collaborative volunteer group comprising representatives of nursing schools and healthcare organizations in Oregon and southwest Washington. Grants will be awarded to help practicing nurses, nursing faculty and nursing students develop demonstration projects aimed at building cultural competency in the field. The growing diversity of the local population has created a pressing need for a more diverse and culturally competent nursing workforce.

This has been a goal of the Oregon Center for Nursing since its inception in 2002, and the issue has been the focus of $1 million in grants and scholarships awarded through The Oregon Community Foundation in the past five years. The two organizations will blend their areas of expertise in providing statewide nursing workforce leadership and managing grant programs to address Oregon's nursing shortage via this innovative approach.

 

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