AkkeNeel Talsma, an assistant professor of nursing business and health systems at the School of Nursing, is one of 15 winners of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s inaugural Nurse Faculty Scholar award.
The three-year, $350,000 grant began Sept. 1 and will support Talsma’s study of operating-room nurses. She will investigate how staffing numbers, training levels and operating-room interruptions contribute to nursing actions that affect patient outcomes.
“A lot of attention has been focused on addressing medical errors, but we really haven’t investigated the role of operating-room nurses and patient outcomes,” Talsma says.
Talsma’s faculty mentors for the project are Dr. Darrell Campbell, chief of clinical affairs at the U-M Health System, and Joanne Pohl, associate dean for community partnerships at the School of Nursing.
“We are indeed honored that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has selected Dr. Talsma as one of the few distinctive recipients of this prestigious award,” says Kathleen Potempa, dean of the School of Nursing. “This is a testament to the foundation’s unyielding commitment to support the progress of stellar junior faculty as they develop scholarly excellence in critical areas of scientific nursing research.”
The goal of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nursing Faculty Scholars program is to develop the next generation of national leaders in academic nursing through career-development awards to outstanding junior nursing faculty. The Nursing Faculty Scholars program is run by the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.
