RN Radio: The Future of Nursing Science

Welcome to RN Radio, the podcast for nurses and nursing students with a passion for learning and staying informed brought to you by Nursing@Georgetown, the online Master of Science Degree in Nursing from the Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies.

In recognition of National Nurses Week, we sat down with Dr. Patricia Grady, director of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and graduate of the Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies, to discuss her role as a health care leader and learn more about nursing research in the United States.

The podcast is accessible below and accompanied by a transcript of the conversation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FIONA

Hello, this is Fiona Erickson, and you’re listening to RN Radio. RN Radio is brought to you by Georgetown University School of Nursing & Health Studies and Nursing@Georgetown, the school’s online master’s degree program in nursing. Today our guest is Dr. Patricia Grady, the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, who is here to speak with us about her career. Welcome.

PATRICIA

Thank you so much, Fiona. It’s a pleasure to be here.

FIONA

Could you start just by giving us a little bit of background, telling us about yourself and your educational and professional experience?

PATRICIA

Well, I received my undergraduate degree at Georgetown. I grew up in a small town and was very interested in coming to a place that resonated throughout the whole country, and Georgetown had such a good record, and I think my parents, knowing the values of Georgetown, felt that I would be safe in the big city in a place like Georgetown.

But I was very keen to come because of the educational opportunities. I received my undergraduate degree in nursing, and it really was a terrific place to be at the time. It was, for me, quite a wonderful education in the substantive areas that I needed, but also it was a wonderful place to be because it was a whole campus. So, there are all the different schools. Because I had transferred in, I had an unusual schedule, and I was able to take, and did take, courses at nearly every school on campus, including the College of Arts and Sciences.

So it was really a very full educational experience for me. It was also amazing because it was so international, and I was able to meet people from countries literally all over the globe, and have some of them in classes, and to find out about how they lived and what their countries were like as well. So, it was really just a wonderful place to be.

After that, actually, I stayed in D.C. to work for a short period of time, and then I went on to get my master’s at the University of Maryland in nursing and my doctorate in physiology from the school of medicine. And I was particularly interested in the brain and the nervous system from my nursing background, and so that was my focus in my doctorate program.

FIONA

Excellent. Would you describe, a little bit, your current role in leadership at the National Institute of Nursing Research?

PATRICIA

I’m the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, which means that I am responsible as—NINR, which is what we’re called, is one of 27 institutes and centers at the NIH—and so I am responsible for leading the Scientific Division of Nursing Science across the country and across the globe, but also interfacing across the campus to integrate nursing into all the other agendas of the other institutes in the scientific areas.

FIONA

You mentioned the other agendas of other institutes. How is nursing research different than other kinds of scientific research?

PATRICIA

So, we’re different in so many ways, and they’re all exciting in positive ways. We really focus on symptom science—the quality of life for individuals—and we also focus on individuals as such as opposed to a particular stage of life or body part. We are very disease agnostic. So we do focus on funding research that will improve clinical care and also improve the health of people across the nation and across the globe.

FIONA

Excellent. Thank you so much for that. I think when looking at a leadership trajectory in the field of nursing, a lot of RNs will go straight from bedside into administration, but NINR also offers research as a huge opportunity. What can you tell us about how you got into research and the kind of work being done at NIH’s Institute of Nursing Research?

PATRICIA

Well, it’s an interesting story, how I got into research. Actually, at the time that I went on to do my doctoral education, there were few programs that offered a PhD in nursing, and I was particularly interested in bringing physiology into the field anyway, so it worked out well that I went in that direction. But there were not as many programs to be research intensive at the time, so I didn’t actually start out thinking about doing a research career. I thought about mastering the body of knowledge of physiology and being able to bring that back to nursing and to integrate that into the field, as we had less of that.

So I did go off to learn the body of knowledge about physiology. I was quite interested, enjoyed the program, but it was a very heavily research-oriented program, as the basic sciences were and still are. And so, the first two years of coursework, I took with medical students, and then when they went into the clinical area, I went into the laboratory. And so I spent a great deal of time learning how to do research and mastering all of the electronics and such, and the fairly heavily technical end, until then quite unknown modalities, to learn to do research in physiology, and so I applied for and received funding to do a three-year post-doc. And at the end of that, I received funding from NIH and continued to be funded to do research throughout the rest of my career until I actually came to NIH.

So, it was something that I enjoyed and, really, the thing about research that was so appealing is that you feel like you’re a part of the future and you’re improving the future. So, when you’re doing research, you know that you’re really creating a tomorrow that’s going to be even better than today, and that was very appealing to me.

Also, the idea of, and I had always been a student, and I had always studied and accumulated knowledge, but I never created knowledge, and the idea of creating knowledge was just very exciting. And creating knowledge that would be beneficial to people, because a nursing career does that. That was very exciting for me.

I also, during my time in the School of Medicine as a funded researcher, was a consultant for the School of Nursing. So, as they started their PhD program, I helped them get it started and helped integrate physiology, which had actually been my original goal. So, I was able to do more than I had planned. I enjoyed doing research very much, learned some new things, and managed, unlike many people, managed to stay true to the area of science that I had started out wanting to study and managed to be able to do that, which was the area of stroke.

FIONA

To sort of loop a couple of things back together for our listeners, in what ways do you think that your impulse to improve-the-future tendency toward research that would benefit people merging modalities, as you referred to it, might have originated in the Georgetown values-based education? They have a focus on excellence, social justice, the value of the common good, respect, and diversity, which you’ve already mentioned. Besides those principles, what other values prepare you to become a nursing leader?

PATRICIA

Well, those values are all very important and it is interesting, it’s hard to know exactly at what point your values sort of are formulated and seep into you and become part of you. But those are values that I prized even before I came to Georgetown, but they were strengthened. And, also, I was shown ways to implement them and ways to further reinforce them, so that was part of what really led to my comfort level at Georgetown. And I think, also, the wanting to do good things, wanting to make things better, wanting to improve the world at large, even though at 17 or 20 you imagine you will improve the entire world …

FIONA

All at once.

PATRICIA

All at once, overnight almost. But those values really did carry me forward. And they gave me this sort of an energy to make change and do things differently. And that was important. Not all programs, particularly at an undergraduate level, encourage you to expect to make change. And we often talk, there are several of us from the class that I was in that have ended up being leaders in the field and deans, etc., and we don’t know exactly how that happened, but we know that a great deal of that happened at Georgetown. Or that it reinforced the values that were in us that might have led us in that direction.

So, I think that was a very important part of my education. It’s also interesting that you have to look back a bit to see the influence of some of those early days, but it definitely was a major influence and continues to be. It often turns out that they actually went to Georgetown or another Jesuit university.

FIONA

So, to loop in some of our students’ experiences, I know in our FNP programs, students take classes that range from research methodology and biostats to evidence-based practice and health care. From your experience, what skill set would you advise a prospective nurse researcher to master before entering the field?

PATRICIA

A good background in math and science and behavior is important. But a curious mind is particularly important. To wonder about things, and not … just, I think there’s a tendency when you’re younger to accept things as they are and not imagine that they could be different, and researchers really seldom do that. And you’re always wondering how you can improve things and make things different. So, I think the idea of doing research really does that. You know, you’re changing things, you’re creating new knowledge, you’re showing new paths and directions that people can go in. And I think it also helps to be an optimist because you always feel like you’re going to discover something important. But often along the way, you have to accept that something didn’t work out. If it doesn’t work out, often you generate an experiment or a study that is not conventionally successful, often generates more questions than it does answers, and then you have all of these other questions to pursue.

And so, it really turns out to be an ongoing conversation with the rest of the scientific community, and sometimes a negative study can be more helpful than a positive study in certain areas because you basically, eventually if you eliminate enough things, then what you’re left with may in fact lead you to an important answer.

FIONA

NINR’s mission is to promote and improve the health of individuals, families, communities, and populations. Georgetown University shares a similar goal with an aim to be a catalyst for health and social justice in local, national, and global communities through education and social action. So having touched on the longevity of your career and the scope of the information that you’re gathering, can you describe how the research done in your labs impacts the communities around you?

PATRICIA

Yes. We fund a number of sites across the country and across the globe, but we also have research laboratories and research divisions on campus as well. So we’ve provided a number of important studies, both internally, intramurally, and externally as well. And because of the research that’s been done by our researchers, we now can say that young adults, in fact, can manage their diabetes better because we’ve tested studies that help them do that. We also have pioneered studies that are now incorporated in educational programs across the country that will help young African-American women avoid contracting HIV/AIDS. We have studies that we have done, among the very early studies, in fact the first studies, that showed that men and women respond differently to pain medications. We also have pioneered research programs that are now being incorporated on campuses across the country for young adults that show how to prevent obesity, how to create healthy lifestyles. It’s always been difficult thinking about taking out in the world at that age, so these programs really are considered to be potentially instrumental in preventing a number of those kinds of things.

So we’re very excited about those.

FIONA

How do you see research, and particularly the research being funded by or done here at the NINR, changing the way that providers interact with patients and families and really seeing the patients reap those benefits of that research?

PATRICIA

So, there are several examples of that. In particular, a series of studies that have pioneered something called transitional care, and that transition care is something that, in fact, has been funded through the ACA, and what it does is it’s now been applied to a number of different populations, but what it does is it helps people who are living with chronic illness to stay out of the hospital. It helps them to stay well, and that, of course, increases the quality of life for the patients and their families, but it also saves money for the patients and for the hospital systems as well. So I think that a number of these studies that we’re funding are immediately relevant and helpful.

It’s another advantage that we do have, being in nursing, is that there’s an entire workforce out there—3.2 million nurses—who are really interested in incorporating the findings from our studies into their clinical practices. So it really does give us an opportunity to decrease that enormous lag time between the production of results from research and getting them incorporated into care.

FIONA

Thank you so much to our guest this week, Dr. Patricia Grady, the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research, for coming to speak with us about the field of nursing research.

I’m Fiona Erickson for RN Radio, the podcast for nurses and nursing students with a passion for learning and staying informed. For more information on Georgetown’s online master’s in nursing programs, please visit online.nursing.georgetown.edu. Join us next time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]