Dr. Norah Johnson, professor in the College of Nursing, remembers a time when there were very few pediatric nurse scientists doing clinical research at Children’s Wisconsin.
Then the Pediatric Nursing Research Consortium of Milwaukee was established.
“We have more nurse scientists now as a result of crossing institutional lines,” Johnson says. “The consortium brought pediatric researchers together and had a snowball effect for developing more nurse scientists.”
The PNRC, established in 2007, is a collaboration among Marquette University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Children’s Wisconsin. It has provided mentorship and grant support to participants, resulting in more impactful hospital-based clinical research projects.
Johnson can personally testify to how transformative the consortium can be. She worked with Dr. Stacee Lerret, a professor at MCW and adjunct faculty at Marquette, on the development of an app called “ePed,” which is short for Engaging Parents in Education for Discharge. The app prompted conversations between nurses and patients about proper home care and safe self-administration of medicines.
Testing the ePed app was just the start of Lerret and Johnson’s contributions to the profession. The app was piloted on two different hospital units at Children’s Wisconsin at the time of hospital discharge. The app prompted the nurse to ask questions such as “how would you contact a health care provider if there were a health issue?” to “what would you do if your pharmacy weren’t open?”
“The consortium was really the initiator for so much important work,” Lerret says. “Not only do we do collaborative projects and scholarship through the consortium, but the mentoring I received here gave me the confidence in my own program of research.”
Lerret met weekly with researchers from all the consortium’s participating institutions for help writing a grant for her search. It proved to be worthwhile, as the grant supported the development and testing of another app called myFAMI for self-management following hospital discharge.
Patients answered the questions for 30 days after being discharged. If their responses indicated that they were having difficulty coping with the readjustment to life at home, the app would alert the health care provider, who would call for a more detailed consultation with a nurse from the research team.
“The consortium was supportive of everything I did,” Lerret says, “It supported the app and it supported my early Ph.D. work as a student at Marquette, particularly my dissertation research study that was also focused on post-discharge outcomes.”
That support paid off. Lerret is the first-ever nurse scientist to become a full professor at MCW, thanks in part to the mentorship she received from the consortium.
“That mentorship is a commitment from both the mentors and the mentees, in the sense that they are committed to collaborative scholarship through expertise in particular methods of research,” Lerret says. “When you bring people with that commitment together, you enhance everyone’s knowledge and skills.”
The possibilities are practically endless. Johnson and Lerret are particularly intrigued by the possibility of integrating the ePED app’s findings with official discharge documentation in electronic health records. Being part of the consortium allows for easy access to the knowledge and technology sharing required to make something like that possible.
“The consortium members share the mission to grow the practice of nurse scientist-led hospital based clinical research in the Milwaukee area,” Johnson says. “We’ve grown because this consortium facilitates our crossing institutional lines.”
“The way I think about it is that each of our institutions has very similar missions,” Lerret adds. “Ultimately, I think we’re all able to advance our mission through the consortium while also promoting sound research and improving care for patients and families.”
