Every Day Is Wear Red Day For Dr. Moser And The RICH Heart Team
According to the American Heart Association (AHA), cardiovascular disease kills more American women each year than all forms of cancer combined. Still, only one in five women believes that heart disease is the greatest threat to her health.
Coming off the heels of the AHA National Wear Red Month, Debra Moser, DNSc, RN, FAAN, professor and Linda C. Gill Endowed Chair of Nursing at the College believes "Most women worry more about their reproductive health." As one of five noted health care experts, Dr. Moser was featured at the first annual National Wear Red Day Symposium held this past February at the UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital. A woman may know she has hypertension or diabetes, says Dr. Moser, "but the whole idea of heart disease as a chronic condition doesn’t ring the same alarm bells for people as cancer does."
It should, especially considering so many of the risk factors for heart disease are controllable. Last year, Dr. Moser became the first nursing scientist in the country to be awarded a PCORI (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute) grant, an award that is helping advance her research in risk-reducing interventions for cardiovascular disease in Kentucky’s Appalachian region, a population with the nation’s worst life expectancy rates. The hope, she says, is to continue to build and expand on the research program and make the interactive, community-based intervention available to more people in more communities.
Investigating the science of self-care interventions for individuals and communities is of particular interest to Dr. Moser and her colleagues at the Center for Biobehavioral Research in Self-Management. The center, established in 2007 through an NIH grant, was initially created to promote and support new and experienced investigators on pilot studies using biobehavioral measures to investigate self-management related to cardiopulmonary conditions. Today, the center facilitates College faculty and students in the use of data from these and other studies to develop sustained interdisciplinary programs of self-management research.
The majority of care is really self-care, says Dr. Moser, adding that interventions that offer patients practical, real-world steps in risk reduction and disease management make a difference in outcomes all across the board, from a better quality of life to fewer rehospitalizations. "It’s not enough to tell people with heart failure to follow a low salt diet," says Dr. Moser. "Our research is about giving people the skills, not just the knowledge on how to do that."
Dr. Moser came to Kentucky in 2001 to help build the college’s emerging research program in cardiovascular health. Since that time, she has built a team that has significantly contributed to the approximately $43 million of continuous NIH funding as a PI, Co-I or site PI. In 2003, she helped recruit another talented nurse scientist, her former colleague at The Ohio State University, Terry Lennie, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, now professor and associate dean for PhD Studies at the College. Dr. Lennie’s research interest in scientifically-based interventions to optimize nutritional intake in patients with cardiovascular disease was an excellent complement to Dr. Moser’s own focus on the biobehavioral evidence affecting self-care in the same population.
The College’s Research and Interventions for Cardiovascular Health (RICH) Heart Program, established in 2004 and co-directed by Dr. Moser, Dr. Lennie and Misook Chung, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN, associate professor at the College, offers a framework for data sharing, collaboration and idea generation for dozens of faculty researchers, collaborators and students whose research interests are centered around cardiovascular and pulmonary health. "Together, we have a number of studies under our belts and because we collect a lot of the same variables we can now pool all that data into one large data set," says Dr. Lennie. "It also allows us to get our students pooled together for mentoring opportunities and the chance to participate in collaborative, hands-on research." He calls the college’s mentoring model a strong point in attracting talented PhD students from across the state, the country and even the globe.
Nursing science is not about research just for the sake of research, says Dr. Moser and her colleagues. The objective is evidence-based interventions that individuals and communities can sustain on their own after the research is completed.
"Research represents the pinnacle of what nurses can do," says Dr. Moser, who was named Nurse Researcher of the Year by the Southern Nursing Research Society in 2012, an honor that recognizes the contribution of an individual whose established program of research has enhanced the science and practice of nursing in the Southern region.
What will make a patient better? Keep an individual healthier? Transform a community, a state or even a nation so that everyone has a chance at a better quality of life? Research holds the answers. And nursing scientists at UK are working on them.
