Decker School welcomes national expert on advanced-practice nursing

“I’m going to give you something you can take right back into your practice that will help you care for your patients and that you can use with your students,” promised Amelie Hollier, an expert on nurse practitioner practice, who led an all-day pharmacology update Oct. 27. The event, co-sponsored by Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing and pharmaceutical company Merck & Co., Inc., was held to recognize regional healthcare providers who serve as preceptors for Decker’s nurse practitioner students.

“This is our way of showing our appreciation for all that you do that enables us to keep moving the Decker School of Nursing forward,” said Nicole Rouhana, MS ’95, PhD ’11, director of graduate programs, during her opening remarks. “We can’t do this without your support of advanced-practice nursing.”

Tim Leonard ’00, MS ’13, clinical site coordinator for the Decker School’s graduate programs, pairs students with preceptors and clinical site locations, creating partnerships for education. “These partnerships go beyond Decker, beyond the University; they are partnerships with the community,” he said. Leonard, a family nurse practitioner, added that the preceptor event enables Decker “to give back to the community and to preceptors, who are so generous with their time, knowledge and experience.”

“I’m a preceptor, too,” said Hollier. A nationally certified family nurse practitioner and fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, she is chief executive officer and president of Advanced Practice Education Associates, a company she co-founded in 1997. Hollier has presented hundreds of certification-exam review courses and lectures on advanced pharmacology and primary-care topics. In addition, she has authored and co-authored 20 books for primary-care providers and been the creative mind behind dozens of products that provide educational and practice support to new and experienced nurse practitioners.

During her first presentation, “Polypharmacy is Not a Bad Word: Treating Complex Hypertensive Patients in Primary Care,” Hollier discussed issues of care for patients who require three or more medications to control their blood pressure and who also suffer from another medical condition (or conditions) that make managing blood pressure levels difficult. She said when caring for these patients, it is essential that providers “get the most mileage out of the medications being prescribed, take advantage of good medication combinations and avoid deleterious medication combinations.”

Using a series of case studies, Hollier expanded on these key points, covering topics such as medication timing, lifestyle modifications, synergistic drugs and how critical it is that providers go through patients’ medications methodically looking for drug/drug and drug/disease interactions.

Over the course of the day, Hollier gave four additional presentations:

• “Lipid Update: What’s Hot? And, What’s Not,”
  
• “Whoa! Is that a Drug Allergy? Now What? Prescribing Pearls for Primary Care,”
  
• “Things that go BOOM! Common Dangerous Drug Interactions,” and
  
• “Coughs, Wheezes and Respiratory Diseases: A Look at Community-Acquired Pneumonia and Acute Bronchitis.”
  

During the lunch break, Miriam Cremer, MD, presented, “Recognizing When a Nondaily Method is the Appropriate Contraceptive Choice.” An associate professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Cremer is president and founder of Basic Health International, a nonprofit organization working to eradicate cervical cancer in Latin American and the Caribbean. Her appearance was funded by Merck.

Held at the University’s Innovative Technologies Complex, this was Decker’s second annual preceptor appreciation event and gave the school an opportunity to provide preceptors with continuing education credits, necessary for their ongoing education and credentialing, at no cost. Approximately 65 physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners and other clinicians attended the event.