For her Capstone, a DNP Grad Sought to Improve Psych Patient Intake
Gloria Akunna, DNP ’24, is a psychiatric nurse practitioner based in New Jersey. (Courtesy of Gloria Akunna)
Gloria Akunna, DNP ’24, has spent much of her nursing career as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, helping young people with their mental health. But she noticed something was missing during patient intake at the outpatient facility where she worked.
“Working with adolescents with mental health issues, nonsuicidal self-injury is something I come across often,” Akunna said. “As a matter of fact, when I started the program and was looking at my caseload, 50 percent of teens had self-harmed. Where I was working at the time, there was no tool in place to actually screen them.”
Because that issue could be overlooked during intake, Akunna noticed some teens were entering without their history of self-harm being identified. She knew it needed to be part of the intake evaluation, so Akunna developed a screening tool to prepare mental health professionals to assess a patient and enter that information into their treatment plan.
The project was part of the thesis Akunna developed for the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree she obtained at Chatham University in April.
Becoming a nurse
Akunna came out of the University of Jersey City with a degree in computer science and began working as a project manager, but she ultimately found the work unfulfilling. She went back to school in 2011 to get a degree in nursing.
“I wanted to get into a hospital, so I applied for a job, and the first position that was open was in a psychiatric unit,” she said. “I fell in love with it. Most of my nursing career has been in psychiatry.”
In computer science, Akunna felt like she was looking at a screen all day. “In this field, there’s a lot more interaction with people that brings me more joy,” she said. “Feeling like I was making a difference in people’s lives, that was another thing.”
Akunna stands for a photo during her presentation at Chatham’s on-campus residency. The two-day residency gives online DNP students a chance to see the Shadyside Campus and meet their faculty. (Courtesy of Gloria Akunna)
Akunna knew early on that she wanted to pursue the highest level of schooling possible in nursing not only because she valued education, but because she wanted to one day go into academics. That’s why she decided to enroll in Chatham University’s online DNP program for her doctorate degree.
“Teaching is kind of embedded into what we do as nurses,” she said. “To be able to help the next generation of nurses in that capacity was also very fulfilling.”
Working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner
“When I went to work in psych and I ended up in a hospital, I knew I was home,” Akunna said.
Primarily, she works with teens and adults receiving treatment at an intensive outpatient and partial hospital program. The job entails patient evaluation, assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and medication management for psychiatric disorders.
After noticing that screening patients for a history of self-harm was missing from the intake process, she made that the focus of her thesis at Chatham. The new tool she developed, she said, is about getting patient information to determine the care needed for them.
“If a patient is in immediate danger of self-harm, they may not intend to actually kill themselves, but there’s a potential risk of unintended harm,” Akunna explained.
Using electronic resources available through the Jennie King Mellon Library, Akunna searched and found studies that were done on the topic. She also wanted a tool that was appropriate for adolescents and outpatient settings.
She found various studies that showed a tool was more effective for identifying patient risk, which informed her as she developed and implemented her own intervention. With the vast majority of patients now screened for self-harm, she found that over half of patients coming into her program had self-harmed, allowing providers to add that information to their treatment plans.
The next phase of the project, now that she’s obtained her DNP, is to see if the information collected will help improve patient outcomes, Akunna said. But there’s still much work to do.
“Once you identify the problem, the next step is to treat,” she said. “The tool is only the beginning step.”
Correction on May 16, 2024: A previous version of this story misstated the year Gloria Akunna obtained her first nursing degree.
Chatham University’s Doctor of Nursing Practice degree is designed for professional nurses and has been named among the best online programs in the U.S. Learn more about nursing at Chatham at chatham.edu.