Research

In 2020, as COVID-19 tore through Michigan, deaths from Alzheimer’s jumped 18 percent from the previous six-year average, according to a Bridge Michigan analysis of state data.

Since hospitals began curtailing visitation to prevent the spread of COVID-19, many allow only one parent at the bedside of pediatric patients.

Assistant Professor Sheria Robinson-Lane, Ph.D., RN, is a nurse, educator, gerontologist and internationally recognized expert on care for older adults with cognitive disabilities. She is not a software developer. But that’s a new world she’s found herself in as she works to create a smartphone application that can improve the lives of dementia caregivers.

In the early stages of the U.S. outbreak, Elizabeth Tone Hosmer Professor of Nursing Chris Friese, Ph.D., RN, AOCN®, FAAN, reconvened with six colleagues from the 2018 National Academy of Medicine Study Committee on the Use of Elastomeric Respirators in Health Care to issue an urgent plan of action. 

Innovation is often accompanied by thoughts of venture capitalists, “Shark Tanks” and Silicon Valley startups. In the health care field, nurses are often overlooked as innovators — even among themselves. But at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, the Healthcare Innovation Impact Program (HiiP) can provide a pathway to a different perspective.

One in five women has a history of abuse and neglect in childhood and youth, making them 12 times more likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during pregnancy. PTSD during pregnancy leads to a host of negative outcomes, including lower birth weight. It’s also a strong predictor of cross-generational abuse and psychiatric problems.

Over six million people in the United States misuse addictive medications. Carol Boyd, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, spent years trying to develop the ABCs of Prescription Drug Safety to address this public health crisis, but she struggled to get her idea off the ground.

“Nurses are in closest proximity to the problems patients face and are well positioned to deliver and implement solutions,” said Nancy P. Hanrahan, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, as she kicked off the Brouse Lecture at University of Michigan School of Nursing’s Research Day: Innovation at the interface of knowledge development and equitable care. Research Day is a celebrated annual event now in its ninth year.

More than 200 students, faculty and researchers came together for the University of Michigan School of Nursing's eighth annual Research Day.

Mohamad Baydoun, a University of Michigan doctoral candidate, recently won a $5,000 research award from the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Foundation. ONS will fund Baydoun’s dissertation research on “Yoga for persistent fatigue in the survivors of bone marrow transplantation (BMT).”