DETROIT, April 28, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rose Khalifa, founder and director of the National American Arab Nurses Association (NAANA), will be the featured speaker at two events sponsored by the University of Calgary-Qatar during their celebration of International Nurses Week 2009. At UC-Qatar's Doha campus, Khalifa will address student nurses in the morning and a larger audience of nurses, healthcare professionals, students, faculty and community members in the afternoon.
She was honored in 2008 by UC-Qatar during International Nurses Week in a tribute to nurses who have made extraordinary contributions and who have distinguished themselves and their profession. Other honorees last year included Florence Nightingale, the first real advocate for nursing as a respected career; Walter Whitman, American author and humanist who enlisted as a nurse in the U.S. Civil War; Jeanne Mance, a National Historic Person of Canada for her courage in making hospital care available in a new land; and Dr. Harry Plummer, professor of Nursing at UC-Qatar.
Khalifa is executive director of Metro Solutions, a Detroit-based non-profit fiscal intermediary that distributes federal, state and local funds to local organizations that require third party involvement in the administration of received public and private funds. Before joining Metro in April 2007, she was a Clinical Nurse Educator, Transcultural Services, at Oakwood Healthcare System, Dearborn, for more than eight years.
She holds a BS degree in nursing from Davenport University and associate's degrees in nursing, arts, science and commerce from Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn.
Khalifa founded the American Arab Nurses Association in 2002, which expanded its scope nationally in 2006, as a voice, a network and a resource for men and women in their pursuit of employment and advancement within the nursing profession. NAANA focuses primarily on the Arab-American nurse but it is an inclusive nursing organization fostering knowledge of cultural diversity and sensitivity between members and the community in the area of transcultural health care.
Khalifa's morning presentation is titled "Nurses as Leaders in Healthcare Innovation." She will discuss opportunities for nurses worldwide to lead the way in providing culturally sensitive and innovative patient care and to devise innovative means to establish nursing as a well respected and indispensable profession. In the afternoon, she will focus on "Evidence-Based and Culturally Appropriate Best Practices in Delivering Health Care to Arab Women." She will describe her experiences as a transcultural nurse in a hospital setting and verifiable successes in providing culturally appropriate health care to Arab women. A question and answer session will follow each presentation.
For information about NAANA, contact 313-680-5049 or visit www.n-aana.org. For information about the University of Calgary-Qatar nursing program, visit http://www.ucalgary-qatar.ca.
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