Who is linda aiken

The recipient of every major research award in her field and an elected member of the U. Smith, mentored Aiken as an undergraduate.

In gratitude for her education at UF, Aiken generously endowed the Linda Harman Aiken Professorship at the college to support excellence in nursing research. At the Dorothy M. Aiken is a true visionary and pioneer for the nursing profession. Her contributions are endless and span the world. Hers was a Gator-centric upbringing, with the young Harmans attending every football game and homecoming, eating ice cream treats shaped like Gator footballs and giving a shout when the original Mr. Two Bits led his trademark cheer.

When it came time for Linda to pick a college, she naturally chose UF. When Aiken entered the College of Nursing in , the program had just graduated its first undergraduate class.

She was a very charismatic person who introduced me to all the possibilities in nursing, very ahead of her time. Aiken remembers the newly designed health sciences campus as an intellectual greenhouse where experts from a variety of disciplines came together.

Doctors are now beginning to see through nurses' eyes how difficult it is to change some of the operational issues such as poor staffing, health professional fatigue, and operational failures that they didn't fully appreciate before, because they were not as burdened with them as they are now. In some ways, it's good for doctors because now they have more of an appreciation of organizational deficits and can hopefully join nurses in trying to create safer work environments for patients and clinicians.

RW : The majority of nurses in hospitals are working with and through technology. How has it made life better or worse? Are new challenges emerging as everyone's work life becomes much more intertwined with computers? LA : I would say very definitively that technology has increased the work burden and need for more nurses, and that is one of the reasons why hospitals perceive that they cannot catch up in terms of hiring enough nurses.

All the technologies introduced are nurse-intensive. I cannot really think of a single example of any technology, especially in hospitals, that has saved any nurses any time, including electronic health records, which are very physician time-intensive too.

Hospitals with better work environments get better outcomes from their electronic health records than hospitals that have poor work environments. But the main issue is that new clinical and information technologies are all nurse-intensive. Nurses like technology and it improves care, but more technology along with the ever-shorter length of stay is a relentless burden on nurses in terms of increased workload without further increasing the nurse staffing.

RW : One would have thought that in every other industry, you bring in technology and you need fewer people and less time, but that is not the way health care works. LA : No, and nonclinical managers don't really appreciate that either.

It's all very labor-intensive. LA : Hopefully researchers will continue to provide evidence to justify a business case for investments in nursing. An example is our study showing that mortality for matched surgical patients is significantly lower in hospitals with good nurse work environments and care costs the same or less than in hospitals with poor environments. In addition to trying to create this business case to finally get the attention of nonclinical management, we're working on the idea of causation.

With a lot of competition for resources, I can see why managers would want to know if they make an investment in x that y is going to happen. If you buy a new piece of equipment, you could probably estimate what your revenues are on the new piece of equipment, but it's more difficult to do that with human resources. We are increasingly focusing on examining panels of hospitals over time to determine the extent to which those that improve nurse work environments and move toward a workforce with a higher proportion of bachelor's educated nurses experience better outcomes.

We think evidence suggests the way to reduce patient harm as recommended by the IOM is to dramatically change the way hospitals are organized from a clinical perspective. To sign up for updates or to access your subscriber preferences, please enter your email address below. We want to hear from our users about how we can improve the PSNet experience. Please select your preferred way to submit a case. Note that even if you have an account, you can still choose to submit a case as a guest.

And if you do choose to submit as a logged-in user, your name will not be publicly associated with the case. Learn more information here. Provide Feedback Submit a Case. Use quotes to search for an exact match of a phrase. Example: "communication between providers and nurses". Put a minus sign just before words you don't want. Example: "adverse events" -"drug". Example: medication safety. The PSNet Collection. Patient Safety Training and Education.

Improvement Resources. About PSNet. All Content. Current Weekly Issue. Past Weekly Issues. Curated Libraries. The Fundamentals. Continuing Education. Training Catalog. Editorial Team. Technical Expert Panel. Copy URL. RW : Tell us about current research on what nurses think about patient safety.

RW : So 10 years from now how is all of this going to look? Department of Health and Human Services. Readers should not interpret any statement in this report as an official position of AHRQ or of the U. None of the authors has any affiliation or financial involvement that conflicts with the material presented in this report. In Conversation with…Barbara A. Blakeney, MS, RN. August 1, The effect of staff nurses' shift length and fatigue on patient safety and nurses' health: from the National Association of Neonatal Nurses.

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