ANAC News - Association of Nurses in AIDS Care

ANAC Launches New & Improved Website

November 2007
ANAC is excited to present our new and improved website. The new wewbsite enables members to manage their own profiles, join and renew their memberships on-line, register for conference on-line and access the Member Directory.

The Board of Directors approved this transition in April. Moving to a more technologically savvy system will not only facilitate members’ ease of use and interaction with the website, it will also enable the organization to more effectively make use of our resources. We are pleased to be providing members with the opportunity to self-manage their accounts, check your renewal date, view a listing of all the meetings you attend, view CE that you have earned through ANAC and see a list of the merchandise you purchase.

As you can see, ANAC has also redesigned our website. We hope that this new website is the first place that ANAC members go when they need information about HIV nursing. New features include ANAC member profiles, a searchable Member Directory, Chapter Histories, improved Resources, and updated Policy sections with automatic Policy Action Alerts.

ANAC Board Appoints Bradley-Springer as JANAC Editor

November 2007
The Association of Nurses in AIDS Care announces that Lucy Bradley-Springer PhD, RN, ACRN, FAAN, will assume editorial leadership of the 17-year-old Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care. JANAC is the leading journal for HIV/AIDS nursing in the U.S. and around the world. It is the primary publication through which the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care fulfills its mission of advancing the knowledge of HIV care, research, prevention and policy.

Dr. Bradley-Springer is the third editor of the journal and will succeed Richard L. Sowell PhD, RN, FAAN, who is a Professor and Dean at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Under Dr. Sowell’s leadership the journal has become a respected nursing and scientific publication that is listed in Index Medicus, MEDLINE, CINAHL and the Expanded Science Citation Index.

Dr. Bradley-Springer is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Mountain Plains AIDS Education and Training Center, and Associate Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center. She has an established record of publication in leading peer-reviewed nursing and healthcare journals and a keen understanding of the current state of nursing contributions to HIV-related research, clinical care, and prevention efforts. She has solid editorial and peer review experience and is a recognized leader in HIV/AIDS nursing.

ANAC Board of Director Names Sowell
JANAC Editor Emeritus

November 2007
Dr. Richard L. Sowell is a Professor of Nursing and Dean of the WellStar College of Health and Human Services at Kennesaw State University. Before becoming the Dean at Kennesaw State, Dr. Sowell served as the Chair of the Department of Administrative and Clinical Nursing at the University of South Carolina; the Director of Research and Client Services at AID Atlanta, Inc.; Director of Critical Care Nursing at Athens Regional Hospital, and a staff and Head Nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital. Dr. Sowell holds a Masters in Nursing and PhD from the Medical College of Georgia, and a Bachelors of Arts in Journalism from the University of Georgia. Dr. Sowell has distinguished himself as a clinician, a researcher and academic administrator over the past 25 years. In 1992, Dr. Sowell was recognized for his unique contributions to nursing by his election into the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Sowell has been particularly noted for his work with persons infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Sowell’s clinical work with persons with HIV/AIDS dates to the early days of the epidemic beginning in the Spring of 1983. From 1983 to 1995, Dr. Sowell maintained a significant role in the direct care and care coordination of persons with HIV/AIDS. As the Director of Research and Client Services at AID Atlanta, Inc., Dr. Sowell built on his clinical nursing expertise in working with persons with HIV/AIDS to co-develop the AID Atlanta Care Management Model for community-based service delivery model. The AID Atlanta Model has been the focus of several refereed articles and numerous presentations. This model has been widely recognized nationally and used as a framework for coordinating HIV/AIDS services provided in communities.

Dr. Sowell’s commitment to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been infused into his teaching and scholarship. He developed the first HIV/AIDS course to be offered to nursing students in Georgia while faculty at the Medical College of Georgia. He co-founded a similar course at Clayton State College that continues to be offered by Clayton State faculty. Dr. Sowell has been an avid writer on topics primarily related to HIV/AIDS, having published more that 140 book chapters, refereed journal articles, editorials and commentaries. He was the lead author on the nursing approach to HIV/AIDS care in a leading medical text (Wormser, 1996, 2003). He has published seventy-seven juried articles. Additionally, he has been a frequent presenter at local, national and international conferences and meetings. In the past 10 years, Dr. Sowell has provided 32 national and approximately 50 international paper/poster presentations. He was honored with an invitation to present his work on using HIV-infected women as consultants for developing research interventions in an oral paper at one of the opening sessions of the 2002 XIV International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Dr. Sowell has been successful in obtaining funding for his research, as well as to support professional initiatives. He has been awarded over $3 million in federal funding. Dr. Sowell’s research funding began with the awarding of support for his doctoral dissertation by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment in 1989. He was the author and project coordinator for a collaborative demonstration project with Georgia Public Health funded by the U.S. Public Health Service, Division of Nursing (1992-1995). This project brought HIV/AIDS education to rural nurses in Georgia in order to allow persons with HIV/AIDS to receive quality care in their local communities. This rural-based Nurse Education Program was both successful and a significant step in the provision of care to persons with HIV/AIDS in rural Georgia. Additionally, Dr. Sowell was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1992-1995) to implement one of the first studies to examine psychosocial issues of women with HIV/AIDS in the southern United States. This seminal work allowed Dr. Sowell to implement his research in program development for women with HIV/AIDS at AIDS Atlanta, Inc, as well as provided direction for further research focusing on HIV-infected women in the South. In 1997, Dr. Sowell was awarded an RO1 grant by the National Institute of Nursing Research to further explore reproductive decision-making and medication adherence issues of HIV-infected women. Further, he served as a principle investigator, co-principle investigator, and co-investigator on a number of other research grants and initiatives funded by NIH, pharmaceutical companies, foundations, and professional organizations. Currently, Dr. Sowell is a co-investigator on the Latino diabetes project funded by Georgia Healthcare Foundation, and the Georgia Statewide HIV/AIDS Community Services Assessment.

Since becoming the Dean of the WellStar College of Health and Human Services he has undertaken numerous organizational changes and program development initiatives. The College was endowed by WellStar Health System in 2003. The College has established the first Office of Research at Kennesaw State University, and implemented a distinguished scholar initiative. The Nursing Department within the College was designated a school of nursing. Both an accelerated BSN program for second degree students and a MSN in Care Management and Leadership have been implemented. The School of Nursing has established two satellite campuses graduating the largest number of new BSN students in Georgia during FY 07. Building on strengths of the College, Dr. Sowell has actively supported the expansion of the College’s Nurse Managed Clinics which now provide community-based health services for over 2,800 individuals each year. A new MSW Program and an MS in applied Health and Exercise Science have been implemented within the College. Must recently, the WellStar College has established a Global Center for Social Change with international partnerships in Africa, Mexico, and Brazil. Additionally, Dr. played a leadership role in developing and implementing an international Summit hosted by his University focusing on Effecting Social Change through Women’s Leadership in Sport as part of the United Nations’ international year of Sport and Physical Education in 2005.

For the past eleven years, Dr. Sowell has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS CARE (JANAC). In addition, he serves on the Editorial Board of AIDS Education and Prevention and Lippincott’s Case Management. He was asked to join the Advisory Board for the Thai Journal of Nursing Research in 2005. He serves on a number of editorial peer review panels. Based on his achievements, Dr. Sowell was awarded the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care highest honor when he received the 2002 ANAC Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2006, Dr. Sowell became the first nurse to receive the Medical College of Georgia’s Graduate School Alumni Award. He has served of the Board of Directors for the Georgia Nurses Foundation and M.U.S.T. Ministries which provides services to the homeless in Cobb County, Georgia. Additionally, Dr. Sowell has served on the Advisory Board for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Pulse Magazine since 2001.