Nursing school boasts top researchers

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Nursing school boasts top researchers - News

Behind the Quad, in an area many students never explore, some of the nation's best research is being conducted.

Penn's Nursing School, consistently ranked among the top in its field, is home to five of the National Institute of Nursing Research's 10 "Landmark Nursing Research Studies."

"Fifty percent of the country's research in nursing that made a difference is happening right here," said Nursing Dean Afaf Meleis.

She added, " Our school is at the forefront and is elucidating the way to deliver the best models of health care."

Among the list is the research of Nursing professor Linda Aiken, who focuses on the consequences of a shortage of nurses. Over the next decade, the supply of nurses is not expected to keep up with the increasingly aging population. By the year 2010, a shortage of 750,000 nurses may be expected and by 2020, the demand for nurses is expected to exceed the supply by 20 percent.

Nursing professors are also conducting grassroots-level research on global issues like HIV and AIDS.

The research of Nursing professor Loretta Jemmott has taken her to South Africa. There, she studies the best way to tackle the spread of diseases, by increasing awareness and changing the attitudes and behavior of people.

According to the NINR, Jemmott was among the first to show that increasing education and proving its effectiveness in schools are key to reducing risky sexual behaviors.

With six research centers on its campus, Penn Nursing is "training the next generation of scientists and scholars to lead the future," said Meleis.

The quality of research is also highlighted by the fact that Penn Nursing is the fifth largest recipient of grants from the National Institutes of Health, although the school is smaller than many of its counterparts, said Joy McIntyre, director of communications for the Nursing school.

Among the research centers is the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of The History of Nursing, which specializes in that often-overlooked field.

One researcher in this field is professor Barbra Wall. Her research, entitled "Clash and Compromise: Catholic Hospitals, Secularization and the State in 20th Century America," highlights the role of religious institutions, such as Catholic hospitals, and their interaction with the state as well as civil society.

Wall, who teaches both history of nursing and psychiatric mental health, was recently awarded the 2008 Fichter Research Grant from the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

"Her study is giving us a very clear picture of how gender and religion and history and institutional setting all made the complex structure of how nursing was provided," said Barbara Denison, chairwoman of the Fichter Grant Committee of ASR.

Her interest in this field began while she was teaching at St. Mary's College in Illinois, where she found out that nuns were nurses during the Civil War.

"So many of the Catholic hospitals were started by Catholic sisters. This is contrary to what most people think - that the hospitals were started by men," she said.

Wall, a nursing historian, is currently writing her second book that focuses on the time period between 1930 and 2000. Her first book, Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace looked at the development of Catholic hospitals from 1865 to 1925.