Before students take their first course at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, UC Davis’ newest professional school is already conducting research to advance health and improve health care. Nursing researchers Heather M. Young and Deborah Ward were recently awarded grants for two different nursing research studies.
“The vision for this school calls for transformative research and that research must be woven into the graduate nursing education programs,” said Heather M. Young, associate vice chancellor for nursing and founding dean of the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis. “Faculty, students and other collaborators conducting research in the communities we serve is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the school, as well as the research itself. To get to that, research had to begin early in the school’s launch.”
Both of the school’s first grants fund research projects designed to improve nursing care as well as improve health for people across a variety of settings.
“Nursing research is integral to advancing health,” Young said. “This research will help us better understand and prove the impact of nursing interventions on overall health care and safety.”
One grant, a $300,000 award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will focus on how to help back-surgery patients better manage pain on their own. Ward, who is the principal investigator for this study, said the interdisciplinary research project will examine the impact of nurse-led intervention of pain self-management for people who have spinal surgery. The study will be conducted in collaboration with the UC Davis Spine Center.“What’s unique about this study,” Ward said, “is that it looks closely at the impact of nursing intervention as people move across multiple care settings, from pre-surgery, to surgery and then back home.”
The research project is one of several through the foundation’s Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a program designed to generate and disseminate research showing a link between what nurses do and the contributions they make to advancing better and safer care for patients.
“The results of this research will supply the much-needed evidence about nurses’ contributions to improving health-care quality and transforming the way we deliver care,” said Mark Pauly, co-director for the Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative.
The school’s second grant, which is also an interdisciplinary grant, is a collaborative effort through the Clinical and Translational Science Center, whose vision is to transform silos of research into new collaborative scientific discoveries. Young is the principal investigator for this study, which focuses on the development and testing of the deployment of nurses as health coaches, while motivating individuals with diabetes to adopt healthy behaviors in a rural and underserved region.
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