Dykes Joins BWH as Senior Nurse ScientistBWH Nurse - For and about the Nursing Staff of Brigham and Women's HospitalDykes Joins BWH as Senior Nurse ScientistBWH Nurse - For and about the Nursing Staff of Brigham and Women's Hospital

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Dykes Joins BWH as Senior Nurse Scientist

Patricia C. Dykes, DNSc, MA, RN, who has presented and published her research on nursing documentation, informatics and patient safety in numerous journals, joined BWH’s Center for Nursing Excellence as a senior nurse scientist in November.

“I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Dykes to the BWH Center for Nursing Excellence,” said Laura Mylott, PhD, RN executive director, Center for Nursing Excellence. “She is known at BWH for providing system-wide nursing leadership in the acute care documentation project to inform nursing terminology knowledge base development, decision support, communication, interdisciplinary workflow processes and reporting.”

Dykes, who most recently served as corporate manager for Nursing Informatics and Research at Partners HealthCare, will provide mentoring and consultation to clinical staff and nurse leaders for scholarship activities including publication, measurement and evaluation of project and clinical outcomes.

Dykes will also continue to advance her own thriving, funded program of nursing research. Her interests include fall prevention in hospitals and examining decision-support and communication intervention for use by the care team, patients and family members to prevent falls. (See the cover for an article about her most recent findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.) In addition, she is conducting research to evaluate the adequacy of the Clinical Care Classification system to support measurement of nursing workload as a byproduct of clinical documentation.

“I look forward to conducting research at the Brigham,” Dykes said. “I had a wonderful experience collaborating with nurses here for our recent study on fall prevention, and I look forward to meeting and working with many nurses on research that could improve patient care.”

Dykes, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has experience in a breadth of nursing positions. She joined Partners as a senior nurse informatician prior to her role as corporate manager for Nursing Informatics and Research. Before that, she held roles including patient education coordinator, nurse consultant and clinical specialist.

She earned her doctorate degree from Columbia University, her master’s from New York University and bachelor’s from Fairfield University.