Also in this Spotlight
Foundation information
Established in September 2000, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation seeks to improve the quality of life for future generations.
The Foundation’s science-based, results-driven orientation stems from the principles and interests of Gordon and Betty Moore. The Foundation operates proactively in three specific areas of focus — environmental conservation, science, and the San Francisco Bay Area — where a significant and measurable impact can be achieved.
Distinct Initiatives have been created within these three Program areas. An Initiative employs a portfolio of grants that are expected to help achieve targeted, large-scale outcomes in a specific time frame.
Each Initiative is grounded in a specific theory of change (a rationale for why strategies and activities are selected and a detailed explanation of how they will produce positive transformations) that informs the Foundation’s grantmaking and mobilizes grantees and stakeholders to achieve shared goals.
Strong partnerships with communities
To make strides and show achievement at this scale requires strong partnerships with communities, government entities, other nonprofit organizations, and the private sector.
In addition to Initiative-based grantmaking, the Foundation is providing significant funding to the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis, Conservation International, and the California Institute of Technology.
These long-term funding Commitments (the sum of many inter-related activities that exist under one large longterm grant) have been made to support these three organizations that will lead to large-scale outcomes supporting the respective programmatic priorities of developing a larger, more highly-skilled RN workforce, conserving the environment, and fostering scientific progress.
Environmental Conservation Program’s Initiatives
Within the Environmental Conservation Program, the Foundation has three Initiatives, and one Commitment, including the Andes-Amazon Initiative, Marine Conservation Initiative, Wild Salmon Ecosystems Initiative and Conservation International Commitment.
Within the Science Program, the Foundation has one Initiative, Marine Microbiology, and one Commitment to California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Within the San Francisco Bay Area Program, the Foundation has one Initiative, the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative, one Commitment, the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing Commitment, and two areas of focus, Land Protection, and Science and Technology Museums.
In addition to funding long-term initiatives and commitments, grant dollars are allocated to special and opportunistic projects with potential for high impact.
Foundation Fast Facts
- Founded in September 2000
- Headquartered in San Francisco, California
Program Areas
- Environmental Conservation
- Science
- San Francisco Bay Area
Facts and Figures (as of 1/07)
- Endowment: $5.7 billion (10th largest foundation in U.S.)
- Annual Grants: 5% per year — $250 million per year
- Employees: 75
- Grants awarded: 400
- Total value of grants awarded: $1.3 billion, $900 million paid
The Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative
Background Summary
Nurses provide approximately 95 percent of all patient care in hospitals and are on the front lines of rapid changes affecting the health care industry. Registered Nurses (RNs) are essential to safe, effective, timely and patient-centric care.
However, RNs are challenged in delivering this care as:
- Increasingly, patients have multiple and more highly acute illnesses, yet treatment is limited to shorter hospital stays;
- There is a serious and growing shortage of RNs across the country, including in the San Francisco Bay Area; and
- RN training has not kept pace with technological advancements and the changing needs of an aging population.
As a result, avoidable medical errors claim up to 98,000 lives in the U.S. every year and serious preventable complications affect many more lives, according to the Institute of Medicine.
The response: The Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative
After suffering adverse consequences from a medical error, Betty Irene Moore made improving nursing care in her community a priority. As a result, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation established the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative (BIMNI) in 2003.
By investing $123 million over 10 years, BIMNI seeks to improve the quality of nursing-related patient outcomes in adult acute care hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area — in Alameda, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties — by both helping to develop a larger, more highly skilled workforce and by implementing more effective hospital practices.
Fixing a broken pipeline
The U.S. faces a nursing shortage of more than 200,000 nurses, and it is projected that California will be short over 40,000 registered nurses by 2010.
At a time when a large percentage of hospital RNs are approaching retirement age, nursing schools are constrained in their capacity to enroll new nursing students. In some cases, it takes qualified nursing applicants up to five years to be admitted to nursing school. In 2005, California nursing schools turned away approximately 14,181, or 62 percent, of qualified applicants because schools were unable to either secure the nursing faculty to instruct a larger class or provide students with the clinical training opportunities required.
To help generate more new RNs in the Bay Area, BIMNI supports programs to:
- Train and fund more RN educators. BIMNI is creating additional nurse educator programs and incentives for graduates to spend three years instructing.
- Expand pre-licensure nursing school programs. BIMNI-funded programs are expanding entry-level nursing programs and clinical placement opportunities for nursing students.
- Expand continuing education for new nurses. By easing the transition from education to the hospital setting, BIMNI programs aim to increase retention of new nurses within hospitals.
- Increase collaboration between nursing schools and hospitals. To increase the efficiency of the education system, BIMNI programs are increasing collaboration between schools and hospitals through technology and new centralized community resources.
Higher standards — better care
Approximately 30 percent of all healthcare costs, equivalent to $390 billion in 2000, are the direct result of poor quality care, according to the Midwest Business Group on Health. Unfortunately, hospital culture and processes are not consistently oriented towards patient safety. In addition, while nurses provide the majority of direct care, the quality of care they deliver is directly influenced by the effectiveness of the healthcare team with which they work — physicians, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and other healthcare professionals — and the supporting processes in the workplace.
BIMNI is working toward ensuring more thorough and reliable implementation of hospital best practices, with the goal of increasing the quality of patient care and achieving better outcomes. It seeks to:
- Implement more effective RN best practices. BIMNI supports the development of skills and resources
enabling RNs to consistently deliver effective clinical practices. - Create systems to support patient safety. BIMNI is working to implement standardized systems-wide best practices, improved work processes and an organizational focus on patient safety in its target hospitals.
- Improve discharge planning for high risk seniors. BIMNI is identifying and supporting dissemination of new models of effective discharge planning for senior patients.