Researchers at the GW School of Nursing are using funding awarded this year to finance new projects to improve the retention and working environments of nurses.
The project is in the third year of a four-year grant awarded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds projects that combat health barriers. Ashley Darcy-Mahoney, the senior associate dean for faculty affairs for the nursing school and principal investigator on the project, said researchers will launch projects to reduce nurse turnover and improve job satisfaction with funding awarded this year by the AARP Center for Health Equity through Nursing and the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action.
“I am actively involved in supporting the implementation of these initiatives, working to ensure that the nursing profession plays a pivotal role in creating a more equitable healthcare system for all,” Darcy-Mahoney said in an email. “Through these collaborative efforts, we hope to build a sustainable framework that empowers nurses and promotes health equity across communities.”
Darcy-Mahoney said the project started after the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published a report in 2021 that laid out guidelines for nurses’ roles in reducing health inequities, which included recruiting a diverse workforce to match an increasingly diverse population, educating nurses on how to respond to natural disasters and public health emergencies and having nurses in leadership positions to train others in advancing health equity. She said the project aims to end in 2025 and ultimately provide recommendations to better nursing in what the project identifies as “key areas” like leadership training, nursing education and identifying structural inequalities of health.
Darcy-Mahoney said since the start of the project in 2021, researchers received funding from nursing organizations like the AARP Center for Health Equity through Nursing to develop methods, like focusing recruitment efforts from underrepresented research areas and creating infrastructure to “support nurse well-being,” to improve working environments and combat structural racism in the nursing profession.
According to the report, the infrastructure involves both individual-level interventions like nurses improving their diet and physical exercise and structural interventions like integrating mental health training into nursing school curriculums.
“The overall goal is to achieve health equity in the United States by strengthening nursing capacity and expertise, enabling nurses to be change agents and leaders in advancing health equity and dismantling structural racism,” Darcy-Mahoney said in an email. “This initiative seeks to improve access to care and services for populations disproportionately impacted by health disparities.”
Experts in nursing said nurses are experiencing higher stress now due to staffing shortages, which has led to retention and burnout.
Megeen White, a health suite nurse at the University of Maryland, said the pandemic exposed the emotional toll nurses’ work takes on them.
“Caring for others can be very taxing, both emotionally, physically, mentally, all of the above,” White said. “And now people get into this profession because they want to care, but it’s difficult for nurses to have that balance between self-care and caring for others.”
White said the national nursing shortage has placed more stress on the workforce, which she attributed in part to the aging population in the U.S. that needs more attentive care.
“If there’s already a current shortage of not enough nurses, the nurses that are currently working are going to undergo more stress and strain because they won’t leave their patients hanging,” White said.
Sue Anne Bell, a professor of nursing at the University of Michigan, said the recommendations developed by research projects can be helpful but only if they are visible to leaders in the nursing field and government officials so they can implement them.
“Staff nurses who are working in hospitals or other health care settings, hopefully they’re reading the report too and thinking about how they can change practice, implement findings from the report on a clinical practice level,” Bell said.
Bell said nurses play a role in helping health inequities in patients by not just treating patients for their current symptoms but looking into the root causes and “social determinants” of their health outcomes to create more preventative measures for future patients.
“What is the social situation in their home?” Bell said. “What is the health of their neighborhood like? What are their financial resources like? All of those factors are the way that nurses have been educated to meet social determinants of health and to provide equitable health care for all.”
