Dr. Margaret Lunney recently received a Fulbright grant to give a Keynote Address in Japan at the 13th Annual Conference of the Japan Society of Nursing Diagnosis and a series of lectures, workshops and consultations at the University of Fukui and Osaka University. Dr. Lunney will include use of her worldwide-adopted tools for nurses to achieve accuracy of nursing diagnoses. She will discuss the fundamentals and trends in nursing diagnosis with nurse educators and nursing students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Dr. Lunney, a full professor of nursing at the College of Staten Island (CSI) since 1997, has been with The City University of New York (CUNY) since 1981. All the while, she has maintained an active and involved research
agenda regarding nursing diagnoses, which are nurses’ interpretations of clinical data related to patients’ and families responses to their health problems and life processes. During her tenure with CUNY, Lunney has
established herself as a major leader in this international field. She has presented keynote addresses on related topics in Japan, Spain, England, and Canada, and has served as a visiting professor in Brazil.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Lunney’s upcoming keynote address in Japan will be presented to 2,500 nurses at a major conference. “This is the third time I’ve done the keynote for this group,” commented Lunney, and “I will spend the other part of my two weeks in Japan at universities consulting with and educating educators and nurses in graduate and undergraduate programs.”

In order to receive her Fulbright grant, which is funding this activity, Lunney had to present her credentials as an expert. “I’ve done extensive research over the years on these topics,” Lunney noted. “While I’m in Japan
I will be helping with scholarly research that utilizes my tools and the concepts that I’ve developed through the years. I’ll be acting as a consultant for them on their research at the same time that I’ll be helping them not just with the accuracy of nurses’ diagnoses but with the art of helping people who are sick to manage the therapeutic regimens related to their illnesses.”

Lunney’s expertise in diagnosis will help nurses think about how they diagnose patients’ health status, and how patients are doing with the self-management of their illnesses. Her approach is holistic, incorporating
partnership with patients and families to optimize diet, exercise, and medication administration, determining how these components fit with patients’ and families’ lifestyles. “I help nurses to think about how to best decide how well people are doing, and what kind of help they need to do better. So that will be my primary contribution in terms of community health,” Lunney said.

At CSI, Lunney teaches a seminar course to graduate students on community health topics and a professional development course in the baccalaureate program, in which she teaches students about electronic health records, the use of standardized nursing languages, and the “the whole idea of being accurate.” She also includes instruction on in-depth health assessments, again, with a focus on accuracy.

“I’m very involved in preparing nurses for the mastery of electronic health records. This is a mandate that has already come and it’s just a matter of time until everybody gets up to speed with the process,” notes Lunney. She is currently conducting studies in Hacketstown, NJ and in Seaview Hospital on Staten Island where she is helping nurses to identify the standardized terms that serve as the basis for quality care and eventually will be part of their electronic health records.