Local research on violence leads to award

By Lisa Kaczke | The Daily Journal

Published 04:50 p.m., November 24, 2009

While completing clinical experience at a Fergus Falls shelter, nursing graduate student Marion Kershner learned that most of the shelter’s residents hadn’t discussed with a health professional the violence they had experienced.

“It’s just too risky,” she said.

That led her to begin a unique study on violence in rural women’s lives in 1998, which she completed with Dianne Long, former executive director of what’s now known as Someplace Safe.

Kershner was recently honored by her alma mater, the University of North Dakota, for her research.

Kershner and Long received funding from the Allina Foundation for a community-based violence prevention research study, Kershner said. Their focus was on the barriers that keep a woman from disclosing if she’s the victim of violence and also how health professionals can screen for violence in the home.

Typically studies are completed at universities. Instead, they knew they needed rural data, she said. A sample was selected from women in women, infant and children programs and clinics in 10 counties. The study remains the largest study on rural women in the country, she said.

The study is used to train nurses and physicians and to develop nursing curriculum, she said.

She noted that the year the study was published, 40 Minnesota women died from violence and 70 children were left without mothers.

“This is a problem,” Kershner said.

When the UND College of Nursing held its 100th anniversary celebration in October, Kershner was among four alumni who were recognized for their accomplishments.

Kershner received the Discover Award, an award for major contribution to nursing research or scholarship, or have used research findings in practice leading to significant changes in the clinical nursing practice, according to UND.

Being singled out for the award was humbling, she said, pointing out that she’s “surrounded by professionalism that astounds me.” She added that she’s proud of the people she encounters in her profession, especially at the Otter Tail County Public Health Department.

Kershner noted that UND “bookends” her education.

She was interested in nursing because she was interested in people and science, she said. As a high school student in Detroit Lakes, her class was visited on career day by a public health instructor from UND, who impressed her, she said.

At the time, she could have gotten a three-year degree with a hospital college. However, she decided to attend Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., to receive the four-year degree needed for a public health career.

Two decades later she rounded out her education with a master’s degree from UND’s College of Nursing, after she received a mailing about their program offering graduate nursing courses. The courses were being held at distance sites, in the days before online classes were developed, and Kershner said she was able to take classes in Fargo.

With four children, she had to go slowly and took four years to complete the program, she said.

She graduated with a specialty in parent/child nursing and now works as the family health nursing supervisor in the Otter Tail County Public Health Department.

Working in a Public Health Department can take a person in many different directions, she said. A public health career is “such fertile ground for creativity and excitement and the prospect to make a change that impacts the population,” she said. She worked with the Public Health Department on and off through the 1970s and ‘80s as she was raising her children, she said. She has worked steadily at the department since 1991.

In her position, she supervises nurses as they complete daily tasks such as early childhood screenings and family home visits.

She supervises four nurses in the department’s Nurse-Family Partnership Program, where nurses work with first-time parents for more than two years and complete 40 to 60 home visits with the families.

She’s been part of the department’s effort to receive a statewide health improvement grant to fund a program called The Golden Start, which promotes breastfeeding for the first four weeks of a baby’s life. Four weeks is doable, she said, and in the program, they encourage women to then think about continuing after the four weeks.

Part of Kershner’s week is also spent hosting a weekly radio show called “Health Matters” on Lakes Radio, which began in 2003 and won an award from the Minnesota Broadcasters Association.

She said she’s grateful that Public Health Director Diane Thorson has given her opportunities to grow professionally and noted that they have a great partnership.

She credits one of her instructors at Augustana College with setting the stage for her. The instructor found the joy in the work, she said.

It’s the joy that Kershner shares with current students who work with the county’s Public Health Department. Many of the nurses began there while they were students, she added.

“To just ignite the passion for public health in students is great fun,” she said.

---

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE THIS STORY?

---