A PhD in Nursing offers the opportunity to lead groundbreaking research that shapes the future of healthcare. Through their dissertations, our PhD students dive deep into topics they're passionate about, whether it's improving patient care, transforming nursing education, or influencing health policy. They are driven to make a lasting impact on nursing and healthcare.
Learn more about the exciting research our PhD students are leading! Please check back in as we continue to add our students' dissertations.
Title: Exploring the symptom experience in adolescents with conservatively managed glomerular CKD (stage I-V)
Brief description: A quantitative descriptive study aimed at exploring the epidemiology and physical presentation of symptoms in adolescents with glomerular CKD, with a goal to further understand how CKD symptoms are measured and analyzed, as well as understanding the impact of symptom burden on patient outcomes and quality of life.
Title: Psychological Safety Among New Graduate Nurses in United States Critical Care Settings
Brief description: My doctoral journal began with an interest in examining professional identity development among nurses. Given the significant impact of the nursing shortage on healthcare systems, work environments, and patient care accessibility, there is a global emphasis on investigating strategies for nurse professional growth and retention. Understanding the process by which nurses construct their professional identity within their work settings and how this influences their career decisions is crucial. However, this broad topic encompasses a lifetime of research! I have significantly narrowed my focus to examine psychological safety, a precursor to professional identity formation. Psychological safety refers to individuals' confidence in expressing ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear of negative consequences, and it is linked to organizational learning, improved patient safety, reduced errors, decreased work-related stress, and enhanced overall well-being. As an educator in a nursing school in Atlanta, GA, I am most interested in understanding the process of psychological safety with nursing students and recent nursing graduates. This research will help form initiatives for pre-licensure curriculum, policy, team-based learning, and clinical practice.
Project mentor: Claire Draucker, PhD, RN, FAAN, has been instrumental in this latest development toward future dissertation study.
Title: Perceived cognitive effectiveness and performance-based cognitive function in heart failure.
Brief description: A quarter to half of the heart failure population experience cognitive dysfunction and they are more likely to develop dementia at a faster rate than people without HF. Subjective cognitive concerns are self-reported problems about memory or thinking without deficits found in cognitive testing and have been connected with a greater risk to develop dementia among healthy older adults. Presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Philadelphia PA, the largest international meeting for researchers dedicated to improving diagnosis, risk reduction, and clinical practice of dementia care, I presented a poster to describe subjective cognitive concerns in heart failure using the Attentional Function Index and examined associations between subjective cognitive concerns and performance-based measures. Using secondary data from Dr. Jung's C.O.R.E. Study (NCT 04485507), we discovered that 64.4% of individuals with HF reported cognitive concerns. We also found small, yet significant correlations between subjective cognitive concerns and objective cognitive function (Oral Trail Making A and B), suggesting that more subjective concerns are related to poorer performance on neuropsychological testing. More research on SCC in HF is needed to investigate the utility in early dementia detection.
Brief description: COVID caused disruption and instability on inpatient nursing units. The nursing literature has not defined the concept of nursing unit stability. This work explores how nurses perceive fluctuations and changes in the nurse practice environment and how these changes affect overall nursing unit stability. Creating an environment that fosters a perception of a stable nursing unit may lead to positive outcomes for team members, patients, and the organization. More research is needed to understand nursing team members' perceptions of what makes a nursing unit stable and how these traits may be connected to positive outcomes. Developing stable nursing units is vital for repairing our damaged nursing workforce, improving team member experiences, enhancing patient outcomes, and achieving organizational goals.
Title: Prep Prescriptions in Indiana 2017-2022: Implications For Clinical Practice
Description: Our research and subsequent publication focused on social and clinical factors that impact uptake of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), a crucial and effective medication used to prevent the acquisition of HIV. Data that was obtained from a large healthcare system in the Midwest, and we essentially wanted to understand what common variables led to missed opportunities for PrEP not being prescribed. Factors such as, race/ethnicity, gender, payment/insurance method, mode of transmission, and facility where screenings occurred were all taken into account.
Our study was the first of its kind to investigate missed opportunities for PrEP within the patient care continuum, specifically focusing on the collection of sexual health history during HIV screenings in Indiana. In summary, our data indicated that men were more likely than women to receive a PrEP prescription, which may reveal unexplored disparities linked to insufficient sexual health screening among females at increased risk of HIV. Options for self-pay insurance and specific patient diagnostic codes were associated with higher odds of obtaining a prescription. Additionally, African American individuals were less likely to receive PrEP prescriptions following a negative HIV result. Lastly, overall provider engagement in gathering information on sexual health assessments was significantly limited, particularly for women and individuals residing in rural areas.
Our study is important because it highlights gaps in clinical practice possibly leading to lower PrEP screening and prescription rates. The low uptake of PrEP is one of the factors preventing us from addressing the HIV epidemic in Indiana, and beyond. By sharing our findings, we aim to enhance healthcare delivery in Indiana, particularly for individuals at higher risk of acquiring HIV, ensuring they can lead happy and healthy lives. Our study is currently available open access on Wiley’s Nursing in Research & Health Journal: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/nur.22354
