The Southern Nursing Research Society (SNRS) conference is taking place in Galveston, TX at the Moody Gardens Hotel, Spa and Convention Center. This is an excellent location for establishing and reinforcing our scholarly connections. Until this week, I was unaware that one of the largest Mardi Gras celebrations is actually in Galveston! Who would have known?

The conference theme is Translational Research: Bridge or Destination. The host schools, including The University of Texas Medical Branch, The University of Texas Health Sciences Center – Houston, Texas Woman’s University, Houston Baptist University, and Prairie View A&M University, have done an excellent job in selecting the location and planning a program that has the promise to be very stimulating.

I’m currently in the keynote session. Our speaker is Lauren S. Aaronson, PhD, RN, FAAN, who is Professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing. Dr. Aaronson’s presentation addresses the conference theme. Here are some of the items that she discussed.

Cooperation, Collaboration, and Competition – should be three goals/strategies for nurses. There will always be some areas where physicians perceive nurses as a threat and a competition.

The current NIH emphasis on clinical and translational research, interdisciplinary science, and multidisciplinary teams is not new to nursing – but it is new to NIH. Nurses cannot afford to ignore what’s happening at NIH. The majority of our colleagues outside of nursing, though, don’t know that nurses have the experience and expertise in these areas. Unless we tell them! This, Dr. Aaronson says, is nursing’s obligation!

Dr. Zerhouni brought in a number of stakeholders to NIH to address critical issues:

  1. what are today’s scientific challenges?
  2. what are the roadblocks to these issues?
  3. what do we need to do to overcome the roadblocks?
  4. what cannot be accomplished by any one discipline but need to be addressed by NIH as a whole?

The scientific challenges include:

  • acute to chronic conditions
  • aging population
  • health disparities
  • emerging diseases
  • biodefense

The roadblocks to progress include:

  • bench –> bedside –> practice
  • roadblocks occur at the translation of bench to bedside and then bedside to practice

Initiatives to overcome the roadblocks include:

  • new pathways to discovery
  • research teams of the future
  • re-engineering the clinical research enterprise

The NIH definition of research is clinical research covers all studies of diseases and trials of treatments that take place in human subjects. Whether the generic NIH definition of research or the more focused Roadmap/CTSA/Translational definition of research, the operative phrases include:

  • in humans
  • in the community

See the executive summary of the NIH Director’s Panel on Clinical Research that describes their three-part definition of clinical research as: 

(a) Patient-oriented research. Research conducted with human subjects (or on material of human origin such as tissues, specimens and cognitive phenomena) for which an investigator (or colleague) directly interacts with human subjects. This area of research includes:

  • Mechanisms of human disease
  • Therapeutic interventions
  • Clinical trials.
  • Development of new technologies

(b) Epidemiologic and behavioral studies

(c) Outcomes research and health services research.  

Multi- and Inter-disciplinary Research is different:

  • in multi-disciplinary research people come together to work on a common problem and then go back to their respective sciences
  • in inter-disciplinary research people come together and forge new disciplines

While interdisciplinary research and clinical research are new to NIH, they are not new to nursing. Nursing research has always drawn research ideas from practice and has always returned to practice to translate our research findings. Nursing should, therefore, be in the forefront of translational research.

There are over 100 doctoral programs in nursing, not counting the additional DNP programs that are being developed. We are well-grounded in clinical and translational research. In the 1970s and 1980s, many nurses received doctoral degrees in a variety of disciplines – the nurse scientist program.

Our nursing research journals are very young – Research in Nursing and Health and Western Journal of Nursing Research came into being less than 30 years ago. With the exception of Nursing Research, that launched in 1952, our scientific journals do not have a long history.

Dr. Aaronson went on to describe some of the questions that have faced the nursing discipline. One of these is whether nursing is a basic science or an applied discipline? We are, essentially, both. We must know the basic science and then translate that knowledge in application to health care.

Although there has been some debate on whether nursing research journals should publish research that has not drawn on nursing theory, Dr. Aaronson offered a wonderful statement:

If it bears on nursing practice, it’s nursing research.

Nursing researchers need to publish not only in nursing research journals, but also in the journals of other disciplines and in multidisciplinary journals. Health Psychology is an example of a multidisciplinary journal in which some important nursing research articles are published.

Nursing is a central player on the health professions team. Nursing is not going away. We don’t need to defend nursing being at the health professions and health research table. Nurses do clinical research … and we’ve done it for a long time.

The NIH Roadmap is an important website to review.

  • There are several K12 multidisciplinary clinical research career development programs (post-doctoral training grants)  in the Southern Region including University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill, University of Maryland Baltimore Professional School, and University of Texas SW Medical Center @ Dallas.
  • There are also pre-doctoral (T32) clinical research training programs at various sites in the Southern Region, including Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Medical University of South Carolina.
  • There are exploratory centers (P20s) for Interdisciplinary Research. In the first year of funding, 21 centers were funded.

Another important initiative is the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS). The goals of PROMIS are to

  • improve assessment of self-reported symptoms and other domains of health-related quality of life across a wide range of chronic diseases and
  • create highly valid and reliable item banks and associated computerized adaptive testing that will be used in future research projects.

Dr. Aaronson went on to talk about the NIH CTSA awards. Over the next few years, NIH expects to fund approximately 60 CTSAs around the country. The vision is that these CTSAs be transforming to advance the discipline of clinical and translational sciences. Goals are to:

  • lower barriers between disciplines
  • develop a distinct discipline for clinical and translational science at institutions across the country
  • train multi- and interdisciplinary teams

The first 12 programs were funded last December. Two institutions in the Southern Region that were funded include Duke University and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Several schools in the SNRS region have been awarded CTSA planning grants.

Dr. Aaronson encouraged attendees to get involved with preparing the full CTSA application at their institutions! Volunteer to do some of the work. Don’t worry about what’s in it for us (nursing) at this point. If we contribute to the development of these programs, we can influence how they are configured to maximize our future involvement.

The conference program asks: Translational Research: Bridge or Process? It is both. As a process, it is a bridge to link research with practice. As an outcome, it is our destination … improving the health of the public. We need to get involved and demonstrate to our colleagues what nurses know and what nurses can do.