Ward Named MNRS Distinguished Researcher for 2008
Photo: Tom McInvailleBy Bob Rashid
For the second consecutive year, a faculty researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing received the Distinguished Contribution to Research in the Midwest Award from the Midwest Nursing Research Society (MNRS). Sandra Ward, PhD'87, RN, FAAN, Helen Denne Schulte Professor of Nursing, was presented the 2008 award at the 32nd Annual MNRS Conference in Indianapolis on March 28-31.
Ward earned her bachelor's degree from the UW-Milwaukee and two master's degrees ('78 and '85) and her doctorate at the UW-Madison. She then joined the UW-Madison School of Nursing faculty in 1988. "I am very much a product of this state," she says.
Ward currently directs both the Center for Patient-Centered Interventions (CPCI) and the pre- and postdoctoral Training Program in Patient-Centered Informational Interventions at the School of Nursing. She is the principal investigator for both federally funded programs, which total more than $3.5 million awarded to the school.
The Center for Patient-Centered Interventions allows faculty to conduct pilot studies, which provide data for subsequent grants written to support larger research projects addressing critically important topics such as symptom management for elderly women with breast cancer, end-of-life decision making, and coping with lung transplantation. The T32 Training Program helps pre- and postdoctoral students. Together, Ward notes, the two programs assist faculty and students in becoming more productive in their research.
At the MNRS conference, Ward spoke about her research, which centers on pain and symptom management for patients with cancer. "It has been roughly twenty years of work," Ward says. "My focus has been on understanding the problem of under-management of pain. I wanted to know the patient's concerns about using adequate analgesics to manage pain related to cancer."
For the first ten years of her research, Ward developed valid and reliable instruments to measure patients' attitudes and documented the extent to which they affected patients' quality of life. Ward has devoted the last ten years to testing educational interventions that could be used to overcome the barriers to better pain management.
"It's almost like a split between ten years of doing the ground work and the last ten years of testing educational interventions," Ward says. "These intervention studies are expensive. That's why National Institutes of Health funding is so important. You just don't get this done unless you have a lot of people working with you."
The nurse researcher credits former doctoral student Heidi Donovan, PhD'03, for helping develop patient education studies, as well as Susan Hughes, MS, an assistant project manager at the UW-Madison School of Nursing. Ward has also worked closely with statistician Ronald Serlin, PhD, professor and chairperson of the Department of Educational Psychology at the UW-Madison.
In addition to CPCI funding, Ward has won four major grants from the National Institutes of Health—a noted achievement in the field of nursing research—and nearly fifty grants over her career. She has written more than ninety-five articles for peer-reviewed publications.
Ward was named Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 1998; the following year, she won another award from MNRS titled the Advancement of Science Award. Last year, students honored Ward with the UW-Madison Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Course Professor.
In the history of MNRS, this is only the second time that members from the same faculty have won the Distinguished Contribution to Research in the Midwest Award in successive years. The 2007 award went to Ward's colleague, Patricia Flatley Brennan, PhD, RN, FAAN.
|
