In honor of National Nurse’s Week, Carolina Nursing is highlighting five spectacular nurses — one for each day of the work week — who were recently honored with School of Nursing Alumni Association awards.
Congratulations to Professor Donna Havens, PhD, RN, FAAN, who was recently awarded the SON Alumni Association President’s Award in acknowledgement of her sterling contributions to the UNC School of Nursing and its alumni.
Dr. Havens’ career has included a rich blend of roles in nursing practice, academe, administration, and research. She has been a tenured professor at the School since 2003 and served as the interim dean of the UNC School of Nursing from 2014-2016.
Dr. Havens developed the Decisional Involvement Scale (DIS), which is used extensively in the U.S. and internationally to identify actual and preferred degrees of staff nurse involvement in workplace policy and practice decisions. For more than 25 years, she has studied, published, consulted, and presented nationally and internationally about the nursing practice environment, nurse executive leadership and turnover, professional nursing practice, staff nurse decisional involvement, relational coordination, and Magnet hospitals.
Dr. Havens currently serves as Bloomberg International Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto in the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing. She will also be inducted into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame in Ireland this July.