Patricia A. Mahoney, MSN, RN, CNE

Patricia Mahoney has been a nurse educator for over 35 years. She retired several years ago as the Assistant Dean of a Joint Associate Degree Nursing Program in New Jersey. She became an adjunct faculty member at Middlesex County College and Excelsior College where she taught several distance courses she designed. At Excelsior College she also conducted workshops to assist students with their clinical exam. For the past two and a half years she has been a consultant for Galen College of Nursing and was their interim Vice President of Academic Affairs; she currently is their curriculum and instructional specialist.

She has developed and conducted local, regional and national workshops to facilitate the role of nurse educator. Workshops for nurse educators have been on a variety of topics including Innovative Curriculum Development, Preparation Course for Certification as a Nurse Educator; Innovative Strategies to Evaluate Learning Outcomes; Computer Adaptive Testing; Multiple-Choice Item Development; Development of Nursing Software; and Computers in a Nursing Curriculum. Pat formed NursEducator Consultants which specializes in curriculum design and assessment. Through her consulting work she has provided consultation services to various nursing education programs throughout the United States. Specific services include development of innovative curriculums, one-on-one item development consultation; critiquing of existing examinations; identification of nursing content area needs based on NCLEX program reports; curriculum review; NCLEX success, and overall program evaluation.

Ms. Mahoney has conducted numerous item-writing workshops for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX®) since the inception of the computer adaptive exam as a test development consultant for The Chauncey Group International®, a subsidiary of Educational Testing Service® and has also provided consultation services to Pearson VUE, the current NCLEX® test vendor. She has authored numerous nursing education software programs. She was the initial chairperson for the National League for Nursing‘s Certification Test Development Committee which was charged to create the initial examination and to engage in all test development activities required for the development of a valid and reliable Nurse Educator Certification Examination. Ms. Mahoney received her M.S.N. from Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey with a focus on nursing education. She also received a B.S.N. from Boston College and a diploma in nursing from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.