Although Dr. Mereness was long retired by the time Dr. D’Antonio worked on her oral history, she remained active on the volunteer staff of the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association, determined to advance the professional place of nurses on all healthcare teams. She passed away in 1991. “Nurses expertise is the experience of health and illness, not the diagnosis,” explains Dr. D’Antonio. “Our strength is helping patients and families understand their experiences and then drawing on their strengths to find ways forward. This presentday focus on patient- and family-centered care is directly attributable to Dr. Mereness.”
Maintaining momentum for mental health research In 2012, Carol E. Ware, Nu’73, a former University Trustee, Penn Nursing Overseer, and longtime supporter, created the Dr. Dorothy Mereness Endowed Research Fund. This endowment provides financial support for Penn Nursing faculty research that focuses on or integrates mental health issues and is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Last year, Yvonne Paterson, PhD, Associate Dean for Research, launched the Challenge Grant program – an extension of the research fund designed to encourage new investigators to enter a research field that is both very important and understudied within the School of Nursing. “Last year we were able to offer a challenge to encourage our researchers to introduce biomarkers into their research,” says Dr. Paterson. “This year, thanks to the Mereness Research Fund, we focused on mental health. Mental health influences many health problems that are the focus of our faculty’s research. To encourage faculty to explore this, we mounted this grant to provide a month of protected time and research costs. Winners explore how mental health variables could be incorporated into their research studies, applying their intelligence and creativity to this important health issue.” In the first year of this program, Penn Nursing was able to fund two faculty projects: one to Catherine C. McDonald, PhD, RN, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Health and researcher at the Center for Global Women’s Health and one to Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAAN, the Marjorie O. Rendell Endowed Professor in Healthy Nursing Transitions.
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UPfront | Fall 2015
Grant proposals were scored based on six criteria: impact; significance; innovation; approach; relevance to mental health issues; and likelihood that the grant would lead to National institutes of Health (NIH) or other federal funding.
Researching risk factors and seeking solutions Dr. McDonald received a $25,000 Mental Health Challenge Grant for her proposal, “Teen Driving Behaviors and Mental Health Factors.” For teens, inattention to the roadway is a major contributor to crashes. Dr. McDonald and her team have developed a web-based intervention aimed at preventing risky driving among teens by targeting behaviors associated with mobile phone use and peer passengers. Within a larger National Institute of Nursing Research-funded study, the team is testing the feasibility of the intervention. The Mental Health Challenge Grant provides support to collect data on how teen mental health issues, like ADHD and depressive symptoms, relate to self-reported risky driving and simulated driving and crash data. “This grant is a wonderful opportunity for me, as a first year faculty member at the School of Nursing, to expand my research in adolescent health and injury prevention to include factors related to mental health,” says Dr. McDonald. “In my research relating to teen driver motor vehicle crashes, I am approaching it as a complex health problem. Efforts in teen crash prevention will not be a one-size-fits-all approach, and teens who have mental health issues may be a particularly vulnerable group.” Dr. McDonald became interested in teen driving behaviors through her roles as a nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit and pediatric emergency department and as a high school nurse. “This is an important area of study because motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death in teens and, although efforts like Graduated Driver Licensure provisions are helping us make huge strides, more work needs to be done,” says Dr. McDonald. “Better understanding of individual adolescent risks may be an important key to improved prevention efforts.” Dr. Im received a $15,000 Mental Health Challenge Grant for her proposal to determine the pathways through which physical activity influences depressive symptoms in Korean-American midlife women.