The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) will provide $2.3 million over the next two years to fund interdisciplinary research projects to improve nursing care. Little research exists to demonstrate the link between what nurses do and the effect of those interventions on patient care and safety. RWJFs Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) program, a $19 million initiative has awarded the third round of grants in this program that will apply scientific methods to finding the link.
One of the awards went to Dr. Cynthia Corbett and Dr. Stephen Setter at Washington State University in Spokane to study how homecare nurses can efficiently resolve medication discrepancies between hospitals and home care providers. The research team will conduct a clinical trial to investigate a new nurse-led informatics-based intervention. The team hypothesizes that homecare nurses are in a position to enhance patient outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and eliminate duplicative services suggested by external consultants or specialty providers.
Other projects will evaluate how nurses contribute to healthcare, study the nurse work environment, and how staffing affects health outcomes and costs. Some of the projects will examine the impact of nurses on the costs and quality of long-term care and ways to improve nursing care in hospitals during off-peak hours.
The other institutions that were funded included Palo Alto Institute for Research and Education, California, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas, University of California, San Francisco, University of Maryland, Baltimore, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, University of Texas health Science Center, San Antonio
The Fourth Call for Proposals issued from the INQRI program will be released on October 15, 2008. For more information on the program, go to www.inqri.org.
