By Kelly Brooks-Staub
The Center for Collaborative Intervention Research (CCIR), designed to stimulate research alliances between the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing faculty members and researchers from other disciplines and institutions, has chosen three pilot studies to be conducted during the 2005–2006 year.
A member of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing faculty serves as the primary investigator for each study, collaborating with scientists and scholars from across the Hopkins community and beyond. The principal investigators this year are Anne Woods, PhD, CNM, Kevin Frick, PhD, and Julie Stanik-Hutt, PhD.
Woods is seeking new ways to improve the lives of abused women. In this study, women who have suffered from intimate partner violence within the past year will receive six calls over 10 weeks from nurse-managed workers trained in abuse-prevention techniques. The researchers will then examine whether these women are more likely to engage in safety behaviors and use community violence prevention resources than women who do not receive the phone calls. Co-investigators include Hopkins faculty members Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, RN, FAAN, of the School of Nursing; Daniel Ford, MD, MPH, School of Medicine; and Tameka Gillum, PhD, Bloomberg School of Public Health. Meg Boyd Meyer, PhD, The Shepherd’s Clinic in Baltimore, MD, completes the research team.
Frick is examining the best techniques to measure how multi-symptom diseases affect quality of life and the amount of productive time spent on work, education, or home management. Frick and his research team will follow patients with the autoimmune condition Wegener’s granulomatosis (WG). The long-term goal of the study is to test whether the data—which will include measurements of pain, depression, mobility, and time spent in various activities—is more reliable when gathered during a particular time interval or with a particular frequency. The findings will enable future researchers to plan their research timetables to gather the best possible data. Frick’s co-investigators include School of Nursing faculty members Kathleen White, PhD, RN; Linda Pugh, PhD; Elizabeth Tanner, PhD; Rosemarie Brager, PhD; School of Medicine faculty member John Stone, MD, MPH; and Daniel Scharfstein, ScD, of the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Stanik-Hutt, PhD, will work with 24 kidney transplant recipients and their families to find ways to lower the chances of transplant rejection and graft loss. Researchers will examine recipients at Johns Hopkins and the University of Basel in Switzerland to observe whether they adhere to their post-transplant therapy, and what factors influence their decisions. With the information they gather, the team hopes to develop an intervention to encourage therapy adherence. Other members of the research team are Marie Nolan, DNSc, RN, and Laura Taylor, MSN, of the School of Nursing; Mathew Cooper, MD, of the School of Medicine; and Sabina DeGeest, PhD, RN, of the University of Basel School of Nursing in Switzerland.
