University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing
Pat Patrician, left, and student Pauline Swiger Donna Brown Banton Endowed Professor Pat Patrician, Ph.D., and Ph.D. student Pauline Swiger, R.N., have each received grants from the prestigious TriService Nursing Research Program to further their research into various aspects of military nursing.
Patrician, a retired U.S. Army colonel and 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, received a two-year, $400,000 award for her study “Impact of Nursing on Readmissions, Failure to Rescue & Mortality in D.O.D. Hospitals.”
Using the Practice Environment Scale of Nursing and Work Index and staffing data from all 23 U.S. Army and multiservice hospitals for the years 2011 to 2014, Patrician will evaluate whether professional nursing practice environments and nurse staffing in military hospitals are associated with the 30-day rates for mortality, readmissions and FTR.
She will then compare the professional nursing practice environment, nurse staffing and patient outcomes in military hospitals with those of civilian Magnet hospitals — those that have been recognized by the American Nurses Credentialing Center after demonstrating excellence in patient care in more than 35 focus areas — and non-Magnet hospitals.
Swiger, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, received a two-year, $14,193 award for her study “What Practice Environment Features are Related to Particular Patient Outcomes?”
Within her study, Swiger will examine five factors relating to the nursing practice environment and five patient outcomes to determine whether the quality of the nursing practice environment in military hospitals is associated with patient outcomes in the same way it is in civilian hospitals.
The five factors relating to the practice environments are: nurse participation in hospital affairs; nursing foundations for quality care; nurse manager ability, leadership and support of nurses; staffing and resource adequacy; and collegial nurse-physician relationships. The five patient outcomes are: medication administration with and without harm; falls with and without injury; and patient experience.