Following the Clinical Leaders: Dr. Odom-Forren Leads National Perianesthesia Symptom Management
Today, national nursing leaders are standing front and center in the research lab, in the boardroom, at the bedside and alongside colleagues and collaborators in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and other health sciences to improve patient outcomes across the board.
Many of those national leaders are standing front and center in classrooms at the University of Kentucky College of Nursing, inspiring a new generation of nursing professionals to follow their lead.
Jan Odom-Forren, PhD, RN, CPAN, FAAN, assistant professor, is a leading national authority on postoperative/perianesthesia symptom management and the faculty leader behind the perioperative BSN elective.
She is currently involved in the early stages of a pilot study involving patients recovering at home from ambulatory surgery who are managing pain, nausea, loss of function and other post-surgical complications that affect health outcomes.
“When students see Dr. Odom-Forren make discoveries to help patients live healthy lives, they become excited to be a part of our future in advancing the profession,” says Janie Heath, PhD, APRN-BC, FAAN, dean and Warwick Professor of Nursing.
“The clinical research I do lends itself well to the class I teach,” says Dr. Odom-Forren of the Research for Evidence-Based Nursing Practice course, the BSN student’s first formal introduction to the science that supports nursing practice. While leadership in evidence-based practice is a common thread throughout the academic nursing program, it’s here that students are grounded in its underlying practices and principles—the measured and exacting process of forming clinical questions, finding and analyzing evidence and implementing evidence in practice while evaluating its effectiveness on patient outcomes.
In the early ’90s, while working with patients as a clinical nurse specialist in a Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), Dr. OdomForren had some clinical questions of her own. Perianesthesia was a relatively new field for nurse-led inquiry at the time and what she found surprised her. “I discovered I wanted to take it a step further and generate evidence myself,” she says.
By 1998, when she became the second perianesthesia nurse in the country inducted as a fellow into the American Academy of Nursing, Dr. Odom-Forren had already served as national president of the American Society of PeriAnesthesia Nurses (ASPAN) and was co-editor of the organization’s prestigious nursing journal, a role she continues today. She’s also served on consensus panels to develop national, evidence-based guidelines and recently helped formulate a national policy statement for the American Academy of Nursing on Do-NotResuscitate in the surgical/procedural area.
In 2009, Dr. Odom-Forren was named co-editor of Drain’s PeriAnesthesia Nursing, widely considered the specialty’s seminal text. She is now at work on its seventh edition, her second as sole editor.
