The Ann Ottney Cain Lecture in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing

Nurses may receive 1.5 contact hours for participating in this educational activity.  Partial credit is not provided. Participants receive a CNE certificate via email from UMSON approximately two to four weeks after submitting their request, a signed attendance verification form, a completed evaluation form, plus a fee of $20.  All requests must be received within 60 days of the conference.

The University of Maryland School of Nursing is accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.

Dr. Ann Ottney Cain, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, was a leader in psychiatric mental health nursing, specifically in family systems therapy. Her tenure at UMSON spanned more than three decades. Dr. Cain ultimately served as associate dean for graduate studies and research at UMSON. When she retired from the School of Nursing in 1994 after serving for 30 years on the faculty, her colleagues and students came together to create the Ann Ottney Cain Endowed Lecture in Psychiatric Nursing.

"I was overwhelmed. It was such a meaningful expression of high regard," Cain recalled. "Psychiatric nursing was the first specialty offered in the Master of Science program at the School, beginning in 1954." Cain says she loved working with graduate students at the School—"serving as teacher, mentor, advisor, and role model to them and to many other professionals in the field of mental health."

Cain made a planned gift to further support the lectureship. "I did this because psychiatric nursing is a wonderful and challenging field," she says, "and the lecture is a way of celebrating it on a yearly basis at a school of nursing with a long history of psychiatric nursing excellence. The lecture calls attention, in a very positive way, to the many contributions psychiatric nurses have made and currently make."