College of Nursing Faculty Inducted as Fellows into National Academies of Practice

Judi Daniels, PhD, assistant professor, and Darlene Welsh, PhD, associate professor and assistant dean of BSN Program Studies, were recently inducted as a Fellows of the National Academies of Practice at the 2019 Annual Meeting and Forum in Pentagon City, Virginia, March 9.

 Dr. Daniels finished her MSN/FNP at Michigan State University in 1987 and her PhD in nursing at the University of Kentucky in 2004. Throughout her nursing career Dr. Daniels gained a wide array of clinical experiences. She is dual board certified in Family and Pediatrics and maintains an active practice at the Polk Dalton: Internal Medicine /Pediatrics Clinic in Lexington, Kentucky. Her background in graduate education began in 1993 at the University of Kentucky. She then joined Frontier Nursing University from 2007 until 2015 where she learned a great deal about web-based graduate education. Her research interests center on weight management, motivational interventions, and teaching-learning issues.

Dr. Welsh is currently the Assistant Dean of BSN Program Studies at the UK College of Nursing in Lexington, Kentucky. The BSN program maintains an enrollment of nearly 1,200 pre-nursing, traditional, second-degree, and RN to BSN students.  As assistant dean, Dr. Welsh directs the day to day operations of the program, supports students and faculty in their academic work, and engages in curricular and program improvements.  Along with student instruction, her nursing career includes 13 years of direct patient care for critically ill hospitalized adults, the implementation of interventions to improve care delivery in a clinical nurse specialist role, and the conduct of research.  With over $2.7 million in cumulative funding, Dr. Welsh has developed and disseminated products to optimize education and health care practices for patients and their health care providers.  In collaboration with teams of interprofessional faculty, she developed the PEEER Model of HealthCare Team Communication and examined best practices in medical error disclosure.  As the principal investigator in NIH funded research, she created an evidence-based low-sodium diet protocol to use while educating patients with heart failure.  Her dissertation research included the development of a tool to quantify self-efficacy in nursing as method for measuring instructional outcomes in practicing nurses.  Dr. Welsh supervises BSN students who are precepted in acute, progressive, and critical care hospital settings and is the co-author of High Acuity Nursing, a critical care textbook by Pearson Publishing.