By MARTY LEVINE
Research was always the focus of her nursing career, School of Nursing Dean Christine Kasper told the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on May 22.
COMING UP
Staff Council’s next Coffee and Conversation will feature Geovette Washington, senior vice chancellor and chief legal officer, from 11 to 11:30 a.m. June 12 in Room 501 of the Cathedral of Learning.
“There’s been a lot of clinical questions to be able to answer that I think nobody else looks at,” she said. “Nursing is applied science. When we do the research, we cut across a number of areas. Things that we would observe are very different sometimes than other people.
“I started with trying to figure out how skeletal muscle recovered after severe atrophy,” Kasper explained. Studies of the effects of bed rest “go into the cell biology and down to the sub-cellular level, and it was kind of interesting: a lot of the things about how muscle gets damaged when you recover” in a hospital.
“Believe it or not, the phenomenon of bed rest in the hospital is identical to all the atrophy they have when you are in space with microgravity,” she said. Her research “actually got picked up by NASA, so I was able to have a bunch of experiments in the (space) shuttle,” since its mission specialists, after a lengthy stay in the shuttle, “were coming down pretty debilitated.
“It’s kind of funny,” she added about her nursing career: “You end up in the things that you never thought you were going to start out with, so you have to roll with it.”
Why a career in nursing? “It just sounded like a good idea,” Kasper said. “I was also a pre-med major — did a lot of extra physics and chemistry and stuff like that too. So it just sounded like fun …”
And what inspired her to become a nursing dean?
“More fun,” she said. “That’s one of the great things about starting out in the academic path. You’re really young, so that you’ve got all this time to do your NIH grants and do all the work. And over time … having mentored a lot of faculty and a lot of students” — 43 PhD students so far — “you, perhaps given your knowledge, should step in there to help mentor these new faculty, to mentor the students, to make sure we’ve continued to do the research and make sure these undergrads really get the best education possible. So that’s kind of how I slid into it.”
Her ultimate intention, she continued, is to make certain all faculty realize their potential, that they “get the resources for them to be able to do their research, scholarship or evidence-based practice, or … being a real solid clinician. We’ve got a very talented group, but sometimes the faculty don’t see the potential they can contribute to health care, to science, and get real focused on the teaching and forget that, ‘Oops, there’s a couple parts of this job.’ ”
Asked what has most contributed to her success and what might aid others, Kasper said: “Network as much as possible, meet all the people. … Asking ‘why’ a lot. … You really have to ask those questions, be annoying sometimes. But really just keep asking the question: ‘Does it have to be done (as it has always been done)?’ Be inquisitive and making sure that you get the answers.”
She added: “The school doesn’t function if the staff aren’t the foundation.” The best school staff members, she said, make sure they are “being factual and telling the truth about a situation, even if it’s uncomfortable. … You can’t use knowledge you don’t have, and I personally always appreciate it when somebody says, ‘Look, here’s my perception: I don’t think this is working right,’ or ‘This is not a good system — this would be a better system.’
“We are not omnipotent, and the people in the trenches know what would be the best policies or standard operating procedures. It’s really, really needed for that kind of knowledge to be shared. I know it would probably be frustrating sometimes, but I know I really appreciate when my staff can say this: ‘You didn’t see that back there in the closet, but you need to know about that.’”
The future of health care lies in interprofessional education, she said, praising the emphasis on that begun by Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences. Shekhar, she said, “is doing a great job with interprofessional education — really meaningful interprofessional education — which is something I’m not seeing elsewhere. People talk about it, but they don’t do it. We’re doing it — really trying to gather the six schools together to work as a team rather than siloed. That’s going to make a big difference in integration of health care progress. … I think it’s really going to revolutionize what we’re doing.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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