Dr. Connie Miller never stops asking questions

Connie Miller, Ph.D., helps two nursing students work with a patient simulator. Dr. Miller will be one of three UNMC faculty members to receive an Outstanding Teacher Award at Tuesday’s Annual Faculty Meeting.

Connie Miller, Ph.D., asks the same question over and over.

“Why?”

“If I don’t ask ‘why’ at least five times in a conversation, I don’t feel I’ve done my job,” she said. “There’s always more to learn.”

The question helps her students get to the “ah-ha” moment, when all they’ve learned finally fits together in a magical moment of enlightenment.

“I want the students to see the patient as a whole person, not just a kidney or a cancer patient, but as a person who has a disease and a lot of other things going on in life,” Dr. Miller said. “I constantly question them to dig deeper. They shouldn’t take things at face value.

“I look for that light bulb to go off.”

More about Dr. Miller “Clinical time is one of the most important parts of one’s nursing career. Dr. Miller has facilitated a constructive clinical experience through relative paperwork requirements, medication knowledge expectations and patience during client care. She holds high expectations for her students while at the same time encouraging students to learn from their mistakes.” Kerry Stinebaugh, College of Nursing – Level 5 “Dr. Miller has been a role model, mentor and a friend for me. She has taught me more than I could ever have asked for in terms of teaching/guiding undergraduate students. Every day with her has been enjoyable and an opportunity to learn something new. She has this ability to let you know in your first encounter with her how much she really cares for others with her overwhelmingly kind heart and soul.” Margaret Emerson, former student “Dr. Miller’s strength as a teacher is her ability to connect, interact and inspire students to learn. Her calm and positive demeanor makes her very approachable and creates a positive learning environment. She has the unique ability to build a solid rapport with her students, making each student in her clinical group feel as though they are her priority. Her knowledge, combined with her compassion provided me with an exemplary role model. I thank her for empowering me with a solid nursing foundation on which I continue to build my nursing career.” Heather Steffen, a registered nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at The Nebraska Medical Center and one of Dr. Miller’s former students

Dr. Miller, assistant professor of adult health and illness for the College of Nursing, is one of UNMC’s Outstanding Teachers for 2009. For her commitment to teaching, Dr. Miller will be one of three to be honored at the annual faculty meeting on April 21.

She teaches up to 40 fourth-year students in the bachelor’s degree program and works with eight graduate students.

Louise LaFramboise, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the nursing undergraduate program, said Dr. Miller adds depth and breadth to the students’ nursing knowledge base.

“Connie is an expert in directing the learning of students,” Dr. LaFramboise said. “She is able to design learning experiences that accommodate the level of the learner, whether the student is a traditional undergraduate, accelerated undergraduate or master’s student.”

“She challenges, guides, assists and moves students to higher levels of knowledge and skill that are needed to provide care in an increasingly complex health care environment,” Dr. LaFramboise wrote in her nomination letter. “She is a strong role model for professional nursing practice.”

Dr. Miller teaches many lessons, but there are four basic principles about which she is most passionate — leadership, lifelong learning, safety and quality.

On leadership — “We teach our students to be leaders every day, everywhere. They must set the bar high and not be intimidated.”

On lifelong learning — “It’s important that students know before they leave here that there is always more to learn. I don’t want them to become complacent.”

On quality and safety — “Nurses are focused on patient safety and care. Now we have to think in terms of being part of the system, we have to speak up when we see things that are not right.”

Dr. Miller is all about interprofessionalism, quality and safety. She recently redesigned the clinical expectations for undergraduate students in the cardiac intensive care unit to reflect concerns identified in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on quality and safety in health care. Because her pilot study was so successful, these expectations have been implemented on all four UNMC College of Nursing campuses across the state.

She also implemented root cause analysis projects with these same students to look at “near misses.”

“Students critique the critical care patient handoff process,” Dr. Miller said. “They observe the exchange of information between health care teams, look for ways errors can happen and suggest ways to improve the process.”

All this is important to improving patient care because 98,000 patients in U.S. hospitals die every year due to errors. It is the fourth leading cause of death, she said.

“Administrators at The Nebraska Medical Center are excited about this project because no one is investigating near misses in this way and students will graduate with a systems perspective that new nursing graduates generally do not have,” Dr. LaFramboise said. “This gives value to our students.”

The quality and safety content that Dr. Miller incorporated into the critical care course was instituted as part of a Quality and Safety in Nursing Education (QSEN) grant through Robert Wood Johnson. The College of Nursing is one of 15 pilot schools participating in QSEN.

Dr. Miller is co-project director on the grant and was invited to serve as a QSEN Ambassador. This honor, by invitation only, provides national continuing education programs and consultation for incorporation of the IOM and QSEN competencies into nursing education.

“We are very proud to have her in a position to represent UNMC nationally in this work,” Dr. LaFramboise said.

A native of LaCygne, Kan., Dr. Miller received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kan., in 1976. She worked as a nurse, quality assurance coordinator and then education coordinator at two hospitals in St. Louis over the next 13 years. While teaching, she decided to return to school.

Her husband, Steve, was transferred to Omaha and she and their two children moved here. She received her master’s degree from UNMC in 1993 and took a faculty position at Creighton University, where she became program chairwoman of the accelerated curriculum. She became a graduate assistant at UNMC in 2002, received her doctorate degree in 2005 and then joined the faculty.