An innovative and highly successful worldwide online community of practice based at the Johns
Hopkins School of Nursing has received funding that will broaden and enhance efforts to deliver
connectivity and best practices to nurses and midwives worldwide.
The Global Alliance for Nursing and Midwifery Electronic Community of Practice will use a
$450,000 grant from the international investment company Kentrik Group to expand its global
outreach efforts and to create specific learning modules and online teaching materials for health care
practitioners in diverse settings. Patricia Abbott, assistant professor, is the GANM CoP's director.
"This fund is critically important to ensuring the GANM's forward momentum in using
information and communication technologies to 'reach and teach' geographically dispersed nurses and
midwives," Abbott said. "Many of the world's most pressing health issues are occurring in places where
access to best practices and knowledge resources are very low. Our online community has proven to be
an effective tool in removing the constraints of geography."
Abbott said that the support from the Kentrik Group has arrived at a crucial time in global
health. "We know from the [World Health Organization] 2006 World Health Report that the marked
decline and migration of the nursing work force has reached crisis levels," she said. "Now we can
address [two of] the root causes of the nursing and midwifery migration--isolation and
marginalization."
The GANM CoP is based at the Institute for Johns Hopkins Nursing PAHO/WHO Collaborating
Center for Nursing Knowledge, Information Management and Sharing. In 2005, in response to WHO
actions to increase the use of information and communication technologies for knowledge management
and dissemination, the center created the GANM CoP, a first-of-its-kind electronic community of
practice specifically designed for nurses, midwives and other community care providers in diverse and
frequently poorly accessible practice settings. Since the launch of the effort in 2006, the initial
membership of 100 nurses and midwives has grown to a current total of 1,300 that includes public
health practitioners and policy makers and draws representatives from 118 countries.
The $450,000 grant counts in the total of the Johns Hopkins Knowledge for the World
campaign, which as of May 31 had raised more than $2.69 billion toward its goal of $3.2 billion.