The Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation is pleased to announce the Pilot Grant Awardees for 2023. The Center's pilot grants support integrated project teaming across the campus with faculty from the Colleges of Nursing and Engineering. Through sharing and learning from each other, usable solutions to healthcare challenges can be created
Multi-level Factors of Physical Health and Well-being in the Nursing Profession
Multi-level Factors of Physical Health and Well-being in the Nursing Profession
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The Capan-Chung-Paluch team will examine factors that impact the health and well-being of nurses with their project, An Exploratory Study to Identify Multi-Level Factors of Physical Health and Well-Being in the Nursing Profession. The team notes that "nurses work in an environment that involves physically demanding tasks, irregular sleep patterns, and emotionally taxing situations. Although nurses spend much of their day promoting the health of their patients, nurses have a high prevalence of poor health behaviors, poor cardiovascular health, obesity, and diabetes." Prior intervention programs have not proven sustainable; in other words, while nurses may have found them helpful in improving their overall health, they did not find them effective long-term. In addition to identifying informational gaps in nursing curricula, the team will be using self-reported data from nurses alongside engineering expertise with analytics to develop an intervention program that is based on physical activity, scalable, and sustainable.
Individualized Blood Pressure Management in the Community
Individualized Blood Pressure Management in the Community
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The Chait-Choi team’s project focuses on Individualized Blood Pressure Management in the Community and will examine the prevalence of hypertension in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the surrounding area. Working at the Baystate High Street Health Center with local clinician Dr. Michael Germain and Baystate Health’s Dr. Paul Pirraglia, the team will collect data from the predominantly underrepresented population that the Baystate Health Center serves. The team points out that "Black Americans and Hispanic Americans have significantly lower rates of BP [blood pressure] control than White Americans; these disparities are likely due to systemic racial discrimination, socioeconomic inequity, and unequal access to healthcare services." The project introduces an innovative blood pressure management approach and addresses transportation as a factor in hypertension; if people can't get to places where treatment is offered, regardless of how leading-edge that treatment is, it becomes ineffective.
Black Maternal Mobility in Western Massachusetts: The experience of transportation among Black Pregnant Women
Black Maternal Mobility in Western Massachusetts: The experience of transportation among Black Pregnant Women
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Black women are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity compared to other women in the United States. There is a gap in knowledge about how transportation influences the experience of care during pregnancy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the transportation needs of pregnant Black women and identify the factors that may contribute to the racial disparities in maternal health outcomes. Relying on a community Based Participatory Research approach, this team will use mixed methods – interviews, ride-alongs, and secondary data analysis – to better understand the transportation needs of Black women in Western MA and lay the foundation for future studies. The end goal is to use this information in future grant proposals focused on developing interventions and suggesting solutions to transportation issues as it relates to accessing maternal healthcare facilities for Black pregnant women. This project is a new interdisciplinary collaboration between the College of Engineering, the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, and the School of Public Health & Health Sciences. The team will train one graduate student and one undergraduate student through the proposed research. This proposal is jointly funded by the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation and Institute of Diversity Sciences at UMass Amherst.



