Donna is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota (U of MN), School of Nursing. Prior to coming to the U of MN, in 2022, Donna completed 36 years of clinical practice at Children’s Minnesota where she worked in a variety of roles encompassing inpatient, clinic, and home care settings. Donna is a certified hospice and pediatric palliative care nurse (CHPPN), and has spent her career caring for children with palliative care and/or complex pain needs. Donna was part of the initial inpatient rounding team for pain, and helped establish the Palliative Care Clinic and the Interdisciplinary Pain Clinic at Children’s Minnesota. Donna became a Clinical Practice Specialist in 2014, and developed pain education, policies and practices for nurses and allied health professionals to improve pain management for infants and children, across the organization.
In her role as the Clinical Practice Specialist for Pain, Palliative Care and Integrative Medicine at Children’s Minnesota, Donna led the Children’s Comfort Promise™, a five year quality improvement initiative aimed at reducing and eliminating pain in children. Offering and providing topical anesthetic, sucrose or breastfeeding, comfort positioning and distraction was established as the standard of care for needle procedures through the Comfort Promise initiative. Donna then led a three year multi-site grant from the Mayday Fund to replicate these efforts at 4 other North American Children’s hospitals. Children’s Minnesota changed their culture to prioritize pain management and obtained ChildKind certification in 2016. Donna continues to present and consult with children’s hospitals and organizations globally to help them improve their pediatric pain management.