Dr. Blackwell was honored on Saturday April 15th, 2023 as the recipient of the UCF College of Nursing 2023 Outstanding Knight Nurse Award in Education. The award:
Recognizes nursing educators and/or faculty for sharing knowledge, creating and cultivating an environment that supports life-long learning, using innovative teaching strategies, utilizing evidence-based practice in clinical areas, and focusing on scholarly research and dissemination within clinical settings.
A decades-long educator and four-time alumnus of the UCF College of Nursing, Christopher Blackwell is currently an associate professor and program director for the Adult/Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program, which he established in 2014. Blackwell is well known for his student-centered teaching philosophy, using innovative course materials, interactive resources and multimedia presentations to engage students and ensure the best possible learning experience. His students consistently give him high praise for making difficult material easier to understand. Blackwell’s dedication extends beyond the classroom as he mentors students to help them achieve their academic and professional goals. As a Knight nurse, he shines bright in his dedication to his students, his commitment to academic excellence, and in mentoring future generations.
In addition, Dr. Blackwell is a recipient of the 2023 Teaching Incentive Program Award from the College of Nursing, an award he has also received in 2011 and 2017.
Filed under: Nursing Science — Dr. Christopher Blackwell @ 22:50
Work based on results from a study conducted by an interdisciplinary research team, which included Dr. Blackwell, will be published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, one of the profession’s premiere academic journals. The article, entitled, Provider Cultural Competence and Humility in Healthcare Interactions with Transgender and Nonbinary Young Adults, looks at how transgender individuals perceive care by nurses and other healthcare providers. The abstract appears below:
Abstract
Purpose: Transgender and non-binary patients experience many barriers when seeking quality healthcare services, including ineffective communication and negative relationships with their providers, as well as a lack of provider competence (including knowledge, training, and experience) and humility in treating gender-diverse individuals. The purpose of this qualitative research study involved identifying factors associated with cultural competence and humility that facilitate and impede effective relationships between gender diverse young adults and their healthcare providers.
Methods: Data came from individual interviews with 60 young adults aged 18 to 26 from Florida who self-identified as transgender or non-binary. After developing a codebook, all data were coded. We analyzed the data using thematic and Grounded Theory-based approaches, and a feminist perspective, to identify themes associated with patient-provider relationships.
Conclusions: We identified 4 themes related to patient-provider relationships: (1) Participants indicated effective patient-provider communication and relationships are facilitated by providers requesting and utilizing gender-diverse patients’ correct names and personal pronouns. (2) Participant narratives conveyed their preferences that providers “follow their lead” in terms of how they described their own anatomy, reinforcing the utility of cultural humility as an approach for interactions with gender-diverse patients. (3) Participants also discussed the detrimental effects of gender-diverse patients having to educate their own providers about their identities and needs, suggesting clinicians’ competence regarding gender diversity is paramount to fostering and maintaining patient comfort. (4) Finally, participants’ responses indicated concerns regarding the confidentiality and privacy of the information they provided to their providers, suggesting a lack of trust detrimental to the process of building rapport between patients and their providers.
Clinical Relevance: Our findings indicate balancing the use of cultural humility and cultural competence during clinical encounters with gender-diverse young adults can improve providers’ relationships with these young people. Nursing education is often devoid of focus on caring for transgender persons. Additional provider training and education on approaching clinical encounters with gender-diverse young people with cultural humility and competence should improve patient-provider communication and relationships.
