Categories
Blog Archives

2017 Symposium Presenter Marian Grant Journey to Palliative Care

Grant’s Washington Experience Links to Importance in Curriculum

Marian Grant, DNP, CRNP (ACNP-BC), ACHPN, FPCN, RN, Policy Consultant for The Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) and the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), is one of two panelists who will be engaging the 2017 National Symposium for Academic Palliative Care Education and Research’s audience on Policy and Quality Reporting in Palliative Care: Opportunities and Challenges for Academic Faculty.

Dr. Grant’s career path is unique among the Symposium presenters, a story worth sharing to illustrate that what begets success often comes from the courage it takes to reinvent one’s self.

What Gave her Life Meaning Drove Career Change

As reported in an article in CNN Money, Marian Grant restarted her career after achieving executive career advancement over 20 years at Procter and Gamble. Moving from a role promoting high-profile cosmetics lines world-wide, Grant re-evaluated what brought meaning to her life. She took a bold move to enroll in nursing school, fueled by the satisfaction she gained as an AIDS hospice volunteer.

Her first nursing position was in the emergency department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, about which Grant shared on the Johnson and Johnson Campaign for Nursing website in 2002. She actively pursued roles that challenged her intellectually to “think on her feet,” and make a difference in people’s lives. Dr. Grant’s colleagues noticed her experience in marketing, and even early in her nursing career, invited her to adapt her skills to promote the image of nurses.

Grant’s Past Achievements Fueled Even More

Grant continued to advance her studies to become a nurse practitioner, moved into practice in palliative care, and became active in teaching at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland. These achievements in palliative care expertise and practice led her to do research that expanded knowledge of palliative care, its availability, and its inclusion in treatment, through web communication, seminars, teaching, and numerous publications. Achieving her doctorate in nursing practice (DNP) from the University of Maryland in 2010, Dr. Grant continued to share her experience with others in curriculum design, teaching, professional presentations and publications, and consultation assignments.

Dr. Grant shifted her focus to policy after becoming a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow in 2015-16. She worked as a staffer in Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office on the Medicare and Children’s Health Insurance Reauthoriztion Act (MACRA) and was then a fellow at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) working on their Medicare Care Choices Model for hospice. Since then, she has been a policy consultant to C-TAC , where she assists this non-profit, non-partisan 501(c) 3 organization based in Washington, D.C., to develop policy positions that advocate for high-quality, person-centered advanced care at federal and local levels. She plays a similar role at CAPC, and maintains teaching and practice roles in Baltimore.

At the Symposium, Dr. Grant will team with Dr. Steve Pantilat to shed light on the policy landscape at the federal level, and how these policies impact academic training and the future of clinical practice. The duo will also focus on the importance of quality reporting in clinical practice, and underscore the academy’s key role in teaching quality and process improvement.