Yet another award has been added to the already impressive list of honors held by the faculty of the Nursing School.
Yesterday, Professor Norma Lang received the 2001 Ernest A. Codman Award.
The Codman Award, named for the "father of outcomes measurement," recognizes the effective use of performance measurement and its ability to improve the quality of health care. The award is given to both an individual and an institution each year.
"I am absolutely thrilled," Lang said. In addition to the prestige of the Codman Award, Lang is also the first woman and first nurse to receive the honor.
Honoring the nursing field "is very timely, probably even a little overdue," Lang said. "I hope it bodes well for the future because nurses are fairly invisible in the system of health care even though they are extremely valuable to what happens. Especially with the number of people entering the nursing field decreasing, we have to give visibility."
Past Codman winners include Avedis Donabedian, for linking structure, process and outcome in a single formulation, which Lang incorporated in her own model, and Donald Berwick, a well-known leader in introducing quality improvements to health care.
Recognized by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Lang was praised for her creation of the Lang model as well as for her founding and developing role in the International Classification for Nursing Practice Project.
The Lang model was developed back in the early 1970s as a step-wise model in order perform quality assessments of health care. After the clarification of important values and the establishment of standards and criteria that articulate the values, one measures the care provided to patients by nurses. The effectiveness and success of the quality of care is then evaluated and improvements are constantly suggested.
Lang used the model to help professional associations, such as the American Nurses Association, to identify their values for health care and to better their care. Lang's model has since been adopted in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Her involvement with the International Classification for Nursing Practice Project began in 1989 with its planning and design. She has traveled across the nation and around the world for this "project of nursing language," as Lang puts it, which allows nurses everywhere to have a more universal set of terms for describing things such as pain.
Lang continues to work on the classification project, focusing on a new term -- evidence-based practice, where "we are trying to bridge what we know in research to what we do in practice," she said.
She has also been teaching non-stop in the Nursing School. "I love it," Lang said. "It's really really neat to be able to be involved with students on all levels."
With the granting of funds to do a state-of-the-science conference on quality health care in April at the University, Lang continues to make contributions to the field of nursing.
She will be formally presented with the Codman Award in November. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania received the institutional Codman Award in 1998 for its health and disease management.
