Healthcare and Patient Safety Expert to Keynote Annual Lectureship

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Bonnie Mowinski Jennings, DNSc, RN, FAAN, will be the distinguished lecturer at the Ninth Annual Sonna Ehrlich Merk Distinguished Lectureship on Friday, March 6, 2009—an event that promotes collaboration between nursing service and education. A luncheon and lecture, hosted jointly by the Indiana University School of Nursing (IUSON) and Clarian Health will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the Ballroom of the University Place Conference Center & Hotel on the IUPUI campus. Dr. Jennings’s presentation is entitled “The Care Environment: Can Chaos, Commotion and Quality Coexist?”

Dr. Bonnie Mowinski Jennings, who served in the military as an Army nurse in many places, currently resides in Evans, Georgia. During her senior year at Arizona State University, Jennings participated in the Army student nurse program to assist her in completing her Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing. That began a career that afforded her a wealth of experience as a clinician, educator, researcher, administrator, policy-maker, spokesperson, and leader. She currently holds adjunct faculty appointments at both the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the University of Washington. Since 2003, Dr. Jennings has enjoyed working as an independent health care consultant.

Funded by the Army, she completed her doctorate at the University of California, San Francisco where she received the distinguished dissertation award. In recognition of her distinguished service to the nation, Jennings was selected as the Army Nurse of the Year in1990. From 1991 to 1995, she served as the Department of Defense representative to the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Nursing.

Following her military career, Jennings was selected as the 2002-2003 American Academy of Nursing/American Nurses Foundation distinguished nurse scholar at the Institute of Medicine. She was also appointed to a four-year term on an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and Research study section. In 2006, she was invited by the National Quality Forum to Chair a year-long Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded initiative related to Tracking NQF-Endorsed™ Consensus Standards. Based on her belief that only the surface has been scratched in identifying features critical to achieving quality health care and patient safety, Dr. Jennings began a post-doctoral fellowship in the fall of 2008. She is a trainee in the study of Health Care Quality and Patient Outcomes at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

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The Sonna Ehrlich Merk Distinguished Lectureship was established in 2001 in honor of Sonna Ehrlich Merk, DNS, RN, who throughout her career created successful partnerships between clinical sites and academia. In 1997, she became the first senior vice president for nursing and patient care serves and chief nurse executive for Clarian Health, retiring in 2000 after a 30-year professional career in nursing. Since her retirement, Dr. Merk has branched out as an entrepreneur and consults with clients on projects related to nursing administration and operating room nursing.
To learn more about the IU School of Nursing, visit http://nursing.iupui.edu/.