Associate Professor Lisa C. Lindley has received a four-year award of $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Nursing Research for her project “Effectiveness of Concurrent Care to Improve Pediatric and Family Outcomes at End of Life.” The study will investigate the impact of concurrent hospice care compared to standard hospice care in improving continuity and quality of pediatric end of life. Lindley will be working with an interdisciplinary team of pediatric end-of-life scholars from nursing, medicine, and health care economics to conduct the first-ever concurrent care study with children and adolescents in hospice care, using nationally represented Medicaid data from 2011 and 2013. The study will compare the effectiveness, potential burdens, and cost of concurrent care compared to standard hospice care for children and adolescents. The findings will expand our understanding of pediatric concurrent care and will inform clinicians and families of the value of this intervention for children and adolescents. This line of investigation is ultimately expected to improve care and outcomes for children, adolescents, and their families at end of life.
Associate Professor Sandra Mixer has received a four-year award of $2.6 million from the US Health Resources and Services Administration for her project “Transforming RN Roles in Community-Based Integrated Primary Care through Academic Practice Partnership.” The project supports the expansion of the academic practice partnership between the College of Nursing and Cherokee Health Systems (CHS), a nonprofit organization that provides primary care, behavioral health, and addiction services to more than 70,000 people throughout Tennessee. BSN students will be recruited and trained to provide integrated services to culturally diverse rural and underserved populations at four CHS sites in East Tennessee. The program includes both an innovative undergraduate nursing curriculum change and advancement of the RN workforce through professional development in primary and preventive care. It will provide the region’s first comprehensive community-based integrated primary care (CBIPC) training for students and RNs, with a focus on primary care, population health, and interprofessional education and practice and an emphasis on chronic disease prevention and control, recovery-based mental health and substance use, and childhood obesity. Faculty and clinical partnership liaisons and clinical coaches will serve as role models, preceptors, and mentors to students through more than 300 hours of clinical experiences in CBIPC teams over two years. Nursing workforce projections for the next decade forecast an unprecedented need for nurses to expand their roles in preventive, primary, and chronic care, and CBIPC training will uniquely qualify our BSN graduates to meet those challenges.