Bianca Beyer Award

As a Registered Nurse, I wear many hats. Currently, I wear a big PhD student hat to advance nursing practice in an ever-changing healthcare system and services. One of the biggest issue is evaluating healthcare through clinical outcomes such as mortality, which is not sensitive enough to capture the full scope of nursing interventions in patients’ chronic illness trajectories. Patient-reported outcome measures, which are multi-item scale used by patients to describe how they feel about their health and quality of life, can capture these nuances and provide clinically relevant and scientifically rigorous resource. Since nurses have a direct impact on patient experiences and outcomes of care, we should have a better understanding of what these measures are, how they are used, and how the results may inform clinical decision-making that are patient-centered. My research is at the heart of answering these questions to improve the use of these measures.