A research team headed by Professor Patricia Groves, PhD, RN recently received a two-year, $451,000 R21 award from the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to examine nurse judgment and reporting of patient concerns in minority and disparity populations.

"We know that not everyone experiences hospital care the same way, and part of the reason may be unrecognized assumptions that healthcare workers bring to communication with the patient,” Groves said. “In this study we hope to tease out different factors that influence the way nurses respond when a patient expresses a concern.”

These factors will be developed into a model illustrating the relationships among patient and nurse characteristics, event characteristics, nurse judgments of credibility and importance, and nurse intent to communicate patient concerns through the organizational incident reporting system. “That way we can figure out how to intervene in a way that supports both patients' safety reporting and unbiased nurse response,” said Groves.

R21 grants provide support for the early and conceptual stages of a project with the intent of encouraging exploratory research. In addition to Groves, the interdisciplinary research team working on this project includes Amany Farag and Yelena Perkhounkova, co-Investigators, of the Iowa College of Nursing, Matthew Witry of the Iowa College of Pharmacy, Brad Wright of the University of South Carolina Department of Health Services Policy and Management, and Janice Sabin of the University of Washington Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Information.