UCSF nursing school receives Moore grant to expand nursing care project in Bay Area
Researchers in the UCSF School of Nursing have received a new $1.4 million grant to expand a project focused on measuring the quality of nursing care in Bay Area hospitals.
Awarded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the new grant will make it possible to increase the number of participating Bay Area hospitals from 19 to 42. The Bay Area project is part of a statewide effort called the California Nursing Outcomes Coalition Project (CalNOC), which currently has about 150 hospitals enrolled.
CalNOC is a collaborative partnership of several organizations, including the UCSF School of Nursing Center for Research and Innovation in Patient Care. The UCSF Center is the designated research coordinator for CalNOC. Center Director Nancy Donaldson, RN, DNSc, FAAN, is principal investigator of the Moore grant.
The overriding goal of the project is to measure the effect of nursing-related factors on patient outcomes in order to improve care, emphasized Donaldson.
Other CalNOC partners are the American Nurses Association/California, Association of California Nurse Leaders, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Department of Nursing Research.
The centerpiece of the CalNOC project is a database of indicators of patient care quality and safety that are linked closely to nursing care. Through the project, hospitals measure and benchmark these indicators, such as incidence of falls and prevalence of restraint use and pressure ulcers. They also measure nurse staffing factors, such as the percentage of contract workers, nurse-patient ratio, RN education, and years of experience.
“The Moore grant is a tremendous opportunity to expedite and expand our ongoing research and development efforts. It also allows us to add new indicators such as medication errors, catheter-associated bloodstream infections, and pain assessment and interventions,” said Donaldson.
Key members of the UCSF CalNOC team also include Diane Brown, RN, PhD, co-principal investigator; and Linda Burnes Bolton RN, DrPH, FAAN, and Carolyn Aydin, PhD, co-investigators. Mary Foley, MS, RN, associate director of the UCSF Center for Research and Innovation in Patient Care, serves as project director.
The grant to UCSF for the CalNOC project is part of a 10-year, $110 million commitment by the Moore Foundation named the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative. The Initiative is directed at improving nursing-related patient care outcomes in acute care hospitals in five Bay Area counties—Alameda, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was established in November 2000 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty. The Foundation funds outcome-based projects that will improve quality of life, concentrating on initiatives that support environmental conservation, science, higher education, and the San Francisco Bay Area.