Families and Healthcare Workers Benefit
by Meredith Lidard and Pamela McComas
Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing faculty members, Deborah Gross, DNSc,RN, professor and Stulman Endowed Chair in Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing, and Patricia Abbott, Phd , RN, associate professor, are using their federally funded research to benefit families and healthcare workers.
Gross is determining if current parenting programs meet the unique needs of Baltimore families by comparing and measuring the impact of two programs: Gross’s Chicago Parent Program and the Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), the current standard in parenting interventions. The study is the first to show the comparison between the programs. “This study will help us identify the most cost-effective treatments for helping young children from low-income neighborhoods with serious behavior problems,” Gross explains. The five-year study is supported by a $3.2 million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research.
To help educate and re-tool segments of the U.S. workforce, Abbott and colleagues are creating a national health information technology (HIT) curriculum for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
The open-source, online curriculum includes twenty courses, which create a foundational curriculum for HIT workforce scale-up as part of national efforts to adopt electronic health records. “As our health system digitally transforms, the need for a skilled health information technology workforce is critical,” says Abbott. Since the courses launched, the materials have been downloaded more than 210,000 times within thirty-nine countries. A $1.8 million grant from the DHHS—Office of the National Coordinator for HIT supports Abbott’s work.