Mundinger Announces Retirement Plans

Posted on: February 1, 2010

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Mary Mundinger, NP, dean of the school of nursing at Columbia University, recently disclosed her retirement plans: She'll be heading to Washington to lobby for doctorate of nursing education funding.
Mundinger has been a long-time advocate for expanded roles for nurse practitioners in primary care and hospital settings. Notably, in 2002, she published results of a study that compared physician and nurse practitioner outcomes in the hospital setting. The study found that care was comparable (Mundinger MO, Kane RL, Lenz ER, et al. Primary care outcomes in patients treated by nurse practitioners or physicians: a randomized trial. JAMA. 2000;283:59-68.).
In an interview with The New York Observer, Mundinger said she's been telling the same story about NPs for years - that they deserve respect for their education and training. "And, I finally feel like I've got through," she said. "It's kind of like my life's goal is achieved."
Mundinger also helped develop Columbia University's clinical doctorate program in nursing as well as a certification exam for doctors of nursing practice. That exam created uproar within both the medical and the nurse practitioner communities because it wasn't an exam tied to NP certification - and because exam questions were drawn from a pool of test items created by the National Board of Medical Examiners. The first of these tests was administered in October 2008, and half of test takers passed. "We tried to make it as clear as possible for any DNP passing this exam that [he or she was] meeting a standard that had been set for physicians in that final test," Mundinger told ADVANCE in an interview about the exam.

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