NAC Member Profiles
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Linda Aiken: Health Reform Could Be Turning Point For Nurses
The role of the nurse in primary care and in coordinating patient care is evolving. This, coupled with the movement toward health reform, presents an opportunity to modernize the scope of what nurses do to let them "work to the full extent of their education and expertise," says INQRI National Advisory Committee member Linda Aiken, Ph.D. Aiken, who is the Director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about how her research has helped inform health reform debates and what INQRI researchers can do to make their research relevant to policy.
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Laura Caramanica: Nursing Research Plays Key Role in Drive to Improve Health Care
Ten years after the IOM reported on medical errors, research funded by INQRI has been adding crucial information to the ongoing debate on quality of care. So says Laura Caramanica, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer for Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York.
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José Pagán: Link Your Research To Current Debates
As the debate rages in Washington over health care reform, how can a nursing researcher get their results in front of policymakers who are making decisions? That's a question José A. Pagán, Ph.D., a member of the Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) National Advisory Committee, says INQRI grantees must consider when conducting research.
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Linda Burnes Bolton: Wear Your Advocate Hat
Linda Burnes Bolton, vice chair of the Initiative on the Future of Nursing, a joint initiative of the Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, remembers the day a nursing researcher told her that they conducted studies, but didn't see the value in getting involved with informing policy. Her reply was swift. "If that's it, you only do so-what research."
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Alison Rein: Moving Research into Practice
AcademyHealth and INQRI share common goals: improving the health care system through research, and translating research into policies or programs that improve the care that patients receive. As a senior manager at AcademyHealth, Alison Rein works on several projects that examine how to involve consumers in quality-improvement efforts. Rein, a member of INQRI's National Advisory Committee, also has been at the forefront of state and national efforts to improve health care data exchange through health information technology systems. Rein spoke with us recently about the importance of INQRI grantees' research, and how this research can move beyond academia to create change.