Nurse Scientist Helps Facilitate Nursing Research

BWH Nurse Scientist Katherine Gregory

A Nursing Department goal is that all nurses have opportunities to grow in practice through continuous learning and professional development. Established through partnerships with colleges and universities, the BWH Nurse Scientist Program supports clinical nurses to improve care to patients and families.

For years, JoAnn Morey, BSN, RN, and several of her colleagues in the NICU have been teaching a class to soon-to-be mothers at high risk for delivering a premature infant. The class details what to expect during delivery and in the NICU and includes a tour of the NICU, where patients see babies who were born at the current gestational age of their unborn babies.

“We want the moms to feel less stressed by seeing how their baby would look if they were to go into labor at that moment,” Morey said.

When Morey became curious about how much the class actually decreases patients’ stress, her nurse manager, Marianne Cummings, MSN, RN, suggested she meet with BWH nurse scientist Katherine Gregory, PhD, RN. “I had never thought of conducting a research study,” Morey said. “The process can be intimidating, but Kate was easy to talk to and helped me take it one piece at a time.”

Gregory began her role as nurse scientist at BWH in 2007. “This role was introduced first in woman’s health as one way of supporting scholarship and promoting clinical inquiry,” said Mairead Hickey, PhD, RN, chief nurse and senior vice president for Patient Care Services. “Our goal is to expand this opportunity to nurses working with specific patient populations throughout the institution in order to improve care, develop new nursing knowledge and advance the discipline of nursing.”

“There are so many unanswered questions about what we do in our nursing practice, why we do it and how to best take care of our patients,” said Gregory, a full-time professor of nursing at Boston College, where she earned her PhD. “One of the best ways to answer these questions is through research. We need more nurses to be involved in research; it is part of our professional responsibility to contribute to better patient care. And, more importantly, nurses often have the best insights on where we should focus our research efforts to answer the most important questions about patient care.”

Gregory said that the clinical nurses she partners with, like Morey, are the experts in the subject matter. “They know the important clinical issues and problems. I help them see these issues with a research lens, which helps us generate knowledge about our practice and improve care,” she said. “I partner with the nurses to facilitate the whole research process, from forming the research question, designing the study, obtaining IRB approval, collecting data and presenting the findings.”

A former NICU nurse herself, Gregory understands the demands of patient care. “There is no learning curve for me in patient care and family dynamics. I fully understand the demands on the nurse’s time and energy,” she said. “I am flexible in meeting with nurses and can come in early, at night, meet with them off site or schedule a phone call when their schedule is hectic.”

She aims to be as accessible to nurses as possible by visiting them on the floors and, she hopes, by launching a journal club in the near future to facilitate dialogue among nurses about research and evidence-based practice.

“It’s important for nurses to be curious. I really believe that nurses have a greater sense of curiosity than most people,” she said. “That curiosity, coupled with research-based practice, leads to better patient care.”

Gregory found such curiosity in Jean Reilly, RN, of CWN 10. “Jean was concerned about late, pre-term infants who are born at 35-37 weeks. These babies are not full-term, but not preemies either,” Gregory said. “Jean wanted to know if sponge bathing or tub bathing these infants makes a difference in maintaining their temperature. Temperature regulation is critical to this patient population, and how we bathe these infants may significantly affect their body temperature.”

From that conversation, Gregory worked with CWN-10 nurse educator Cynthia Loring, RNC, CNS, Reilly and the entire Late Preterm Committee, including Reilly, Barbara Gargan, Valerie Leblanc, Paulette Melanson and Cathleen Walker, to launch a study of tub bathing versus sponge bathing. The study was approved by the IRB and began in February, with the entire group participating.

Both Reilly and Morey’s posters were accepted at the Eastern Nursing Research Society’s (ENRS) annual meeting “This is quite prestigious,” Gregory said. “This is a conference of nurse researchers, most of whom work in academic settings, many with research funding. It is rare to have clinical nurses present this type of rigorous patient-oriented research at ENRS.”

In her own program of research, Gregory examines ways to predict disease, primarily in newborns. One project she is working on is measuring a certain protein detectable in baby urine that may be a biomarker for necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a devastating gastrointestinal disease that primarily affects premature infants. “Ideally, if this protein predicts NEC, I would then like to translate that finding to develop a type of test that nurses could perform at the bedside when they are concerned that a baby might be developing NEC,” she said.

Gregory is always interested in speaking to BWH nurses about furthering their education, whether it is obtaining a bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degree. “We really need more nurses involved in patient-oriented research and seeking education can often help meet that goal,” she said. “But I know that going back to school can be really challenging. I want to help people figure out a way to do it, even just one course at a time. I juggled many roles and demands on my time while earning my PhD, and while it was really demanding at times, I got through it. It can be done.”

The mother of two sons, ages two and four, with her husband, an MIT researcher, Gregory also teaches two courses per semester at Boston College, in addition to conducting her own research and holding the nurse scientist appointment at BWH.

“I miss patient care every single day, so being here at BWH, even for just a few hours a week, really adds to my perspective. I know that it makes me be a better nurse, a better researcher and a better professor,” she said. “I love being in the clinical environment, and I love working with nurses.”

Gregory has worked or volunteered in hospitals in some capacity since she was a candy striper in the seventh grade. “I always knew I wanted to go into some kind of health profession. And I have always been interested in science, research and, most of all, people,” she said. “Nursing is one of the few professions where you can do it all. Nurses have the privilege of caring for patients and families, the ability to lead patient-oriented research and the ongoing opportunity to educate the future members of our profession.”