Man of the Month: Jack Needleman
May 9, 2013
In honor of National Nurses Week, we’ve nominated a May Man of the Month who has focused his research on improving the work environment for nurses… the Disruptive Woman twist, he isn’t a nurse!
Jack Needleman, PhD, FAAN is Professor of Health Services in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health, where he is Director of the department’s PhD and research master’s programs.
His research, which focuses on nursing and quality, has been nationally recognized. Specifically, his work on hospital nurse staffing and patient outcomes won the first AcademyHealth Health Service Research Impact Award, and his work on nursing performance measurement was used by the National Quality Forum in its Nursing Care Performance Measures Project. He led the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s initiative Transforming Care at the Bedside, providing insight on how frontline staff-led quality improvement efforts influence patient care and the organization of work on nursing units. He helped design the evaluation’s strategy for measuring impacts on safety and reliability, workflow, work environment, and patient-centeredness of care. He is Co-Principal Investigator on the evaluation of the VA Nursing Academy, studying its impact on faculty recruitment, nursing class sizes, and nursing education.
In an interview about his research with AHRQ’s Morbidity and Mortality Rounds on the Web, Dr. Needleman said, “What I knew from looking at the literature and what I think the public understood was that nursing is physically and emotionally demanding work. What I think the public didn’t recognize, and what I came to appreciate as I talked to people during the early analysis, is that it’s intellectually demanding work. This whole issue of being able to observe your patients, assess them, anticipate how they’re doing and what could be going wrong, and take appropriate intervention steps requires a high level of training. I have also come to appreciate that nursing, even for the frontline staff, is managerially complex work.”
This is the type of statement that needs to be made about nurses. Just as important is the need for more research like Dr. Needleman’s that can lead to statements like the above.
Disruptive Women isn’t the first to recognize his commitment to nursing. In 2007 Dr. Needleman was made an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
For what he has done and continues to do for the nursing profession we are pleased to name Jack Needleman this month’s Man of the Month. And to all our nurse readers, Happy National Nurses Week! Thank you for all you do for your patients and the health care system. Disruptive Women salutes you!
Original Article from HERE 