A Federal Advanced Education Grant in the amount of $585,220 was awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Rush University College of Nursing to develop innovative online clinical supervision tools for psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner students at the college. Co-principal investigators (PIs) on this grant are Linnea Carlson-Sabelli, PhD, and Kathleen R. Delaney, PhD. The grant begins on July 1, 2008 and ends on June 30, 2011.

The purpose of the grant is to increase the proportion of nurses who are prepared to meet psychiatric mental health and primary health care needs of patients with mental illnesses in rural and underserved areas; to increase availability of mental health services to populations who have a disproportionate share of mental illnesses related to lack of services and conditions of poverty; to improve psychiatric mental health knowledge, skills and competencies and collaboration of advanced practice students and practitioners in rural and culturally diverse clinical settings; and to provide an infrastructure to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the entire psychiatric mental health work force.

The plan involves both a vigorous recruitment effort to attract nurses working in rural and remote clinical sites to the highly acclaimed Rush University online PMH-NP program, and the launching of an innovative and unique online competency development system (CDS) to supervise and promote the clinical competency development of PMH-NP students with diverse backgrounds in remote and uneven clinical placements.

Linnea Carlson-Sabelli, PhD, has been a full-time faculty member at Rush University College of Nursing for more than 30 years. She is also a certified advanced practice nurse, and is an internationally known trainer, educator and practitioner of psychotherapy, psychodrama and sociometry and group psychotherapy.

Kathleen Delaney, PhD, has been at Rush for 30 years, often in College of Nursing/Rush University Medical Center joint appointments. Her practice site is the child inpatient psychiatric unit. She is a certified psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner-family. Delaney is president-elect of the International Society of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing. She is nationally known for her work on inpatient restraint reduction and articulating the evidence-base of inpatient treatment.