Have you signed up to receive Sharing Nursing’s Knowledge? The monthly Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) e-newsletter will keep you up to date on the work of RWJF’s nursing programs, and the latest news, research and trends relating to academic progression, leadership, and other critically important nursing issues.  These are some of the stories in the March issue:

RWJF Announces Initiative to Support State Efforts to Transform Health Care through Nursing
RWJF has announced a new $3 million initiative to help states prepare the nursing profession to address our nation’s most pressing health care challenges—access, quality, and cost. The Future of Nursing State Implementation Program will bolster efforts already underway in 50 states and the District of Columbia—the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action—to transform health care through nursing and meet the challenges stemming from an aging and more diverse population. The initiative is providing two-year grants of up to $150,000 to 20 state-based Action Coalitions.

Nation’s Nurse Leaders Convene in D.C.
Nurses and health leaders from across the country assembled in the nation’s capital in early March to advance a national campaign to transform the nursing profession in order to improve health and health care. Hundreds of participants from state Action Coalitions shared ideas and developed plans to move their collective agenda forward at the Campaign for Action National Summit. The summit was designed to help Action Coalition leaders and supporters identify their own priorities and understand those of other Action Coalitions, develop strategic plans to actualize those priorities, come up with new ways to increase their impact, and align state-level work with the national agenda.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

A study led by RWJF Health & Society Scholars alumna Emily Goard Jacobs, PhD, finds that the estrogen in hormone replacement therapy may help protect some women from Alzheimer's, when taken beginning at menopause. Health Canal and the Telegraph (United Kingdom) report on the findings. Read more about the study.

New Careers in Nursing, a program of RWJF and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, launched the Doctoral Advancement in Nursing (DAN) project to identify and encourage nurses interested in pursuing doctoral degrees, and to support doctoral nursing students in their studies. The DAN project is scheduled to issue a white paper this summer; it will offer strategies and resources to support doctoral advancement, Healthcare Traveler reports.

Ryan Masters, PhD, a Health & Society Scholar, spoke to NPR’s Shots blog about an editorial he co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association that points to problems in a study that found being a “little” overweight was associated with a lower risk of death. “The risk of mortality from obesity compounds and grows stronger as you age,” he said. “In light of our findings, we are… much more concerned about inappropriate denial of the epidemic's consequences for U.S. mortality.”

John H. Cawley, an alumnus and National Advisory Committee Member of the RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research program, spoke to NPR’s Morning Edition about why monetary rewards for employees to lose weight may not work. Cawley’s research finds that three-quarters of people give up on diets even when they stand to earn a monetary reward for losing weight. On the other hand, he finds, people will fight harder to shed weight if they stand to lose money should they fail.

Gary A. Taubes, MSE, MS, is recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative. He is an award-winning science and health journalist, and author of Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Human Capital Blog: Why did you and Dr. Attia start the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI)? What was the problem you saw that needed to be addressed?

Gary Taubes: I spent the better part of a decade, from the late 90s through 2007, doing an extensive journalistic investigation of the research that led us to our established beliefs about the environmental triggers of obesity, type 2 diabetes and their associated chronic diseases, which include heart disease and cancer. During these years it also became clear that the economic burden of these diseases was becoming unsustainable and were driving health care costs in this country. Obesity alone is estimated to cost the health care system $150 billion a year, and add type 2 diabetes and that number might double.

My research led me to two major conclusions. One is that our understanding of what fundamentally causes obesity may be incorrect: that it may not be what researchers refer to as an "energy balance" disorder— that we merely consume more calories than we expend—but rather a hormonal/regulatory defect, just like any other growth disorder. This was the hypothesis embraced by European clinicians prior to the Second World War. What I learned in my research was that this hypothesis vanished with the war and the evaporation of the relevant medical research community. Instead we all came to believe that obesity is simple–caused by eating too much or being too sedentary or some combination of the two—and this is what our national guidelines have communicated to the public and to individuals. While this has happened, the nation has waxed fatter and fatter.

The second conclusion of my work and my books was that the research in nutrition and obesity has simply never been rigorous enough to establish reliable knowledge in this field, one way or the other. There are a lot of good reasons for this, in particular that doing rigorous experimental trials with humans is difficult and exceedingly expensive. But without these experiments, we're just guessing when we say we know why humans get fat. It's quite likely that one reason we've seen an obesity epidemic is because our fundamental understanding of the disorder itself and how to cure and prevent it is incorrect. And if this is true about obesity, it's true about diabetes and heart disease as well.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

Health Canal reports on a study led by RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research alumna Joanna Kempner, PhD, that examines the social stigma surrounding chronic migraine sufferers. “The enduring image of the typical migraine patient is a white, middle-class woman who just isn’t good at handling stress,” Kempner said. “She is seen as neurotic and weak, a stigma that has been hard to change.”

RWJF Nurse Faculty Scholar alumna Ruth Taylor-Piliae, PhD, RN, FAHA, was featured in MyHealthNewsDaily, an online health care news digest, for her study suggesting Tai Chi can reduce the number of falls in adults who have survived a stroke. Taylor-Piliae, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Nursing in Tucson, surveyed 89 stroke survivors and found that practicing Tai Chi helps alleviate balance problems that afflict many survivors. Read more about her work.

Medpage Today reports on research co-authored by William K. Hallman, PhD, director of the Rutgers University Food Policy Institute and recipient of an RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, about how to motivate consumers to look for and discard recalled food products. Hallman participated in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meeting this week on breaking through food recall “message fatigue” [free subscription].

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

An op-ed in the Star-Ledger reflects on the contributions of Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey, during his more than two decades of service on the RWJF Board of Trustees, including eight years as chairman of the Board. Learn more about Kean’s commitment to leadership and service.

The Washington Post reports on an inhaler with a built-in Global-Positioning System (GPS), designed by RWJF Health & Society Scholars alumnus David Van Sickle, PhD, MA, that sends a signal with the time and location to a remote server every time a patient uses it. The data is then sent regularly to patients and physicians to help provide more comprehensive treatment. The data can also be used to find asthma “hot spots” in cities, where attacks are triggered, Health & Society Scholar Meredith Barrett, PhD, said. Read more about Van Sickle’s work here and here.

Judi Hilman, director of the Utah Health Policy Project and an RWJF Community Health Leader, gave comments to the Deseret News about decisions and deadlines Utah will have to meet in 2013 to comply with the health reform law.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

RWJF Clinical Scholars program alumnus Arthur Kellerman, MD, MPH, FACEP, was quoted in a Washington Post story on the Obama Administration's push to renew federal funding for public health research on gun violence. Language initially included in a 1996 appropriations bill has, he said, "virtually stopped good public health science on [gun research] for the last 10 to 15 years.” White House lawyers recently concluded that the law doesn’t prohibit such research. Kellermann, also an alumnus of the RWJF Health Policy Fellows program, co-authored an article on the subject in the Journal of the American Medical Association with Clinical Scholars alumnus Frederick Rivara, MD, MPH.

RWJF Health & Society Scholars Program Director and Health Policy Fellows alumna Jo Ivey Boufford, MD, was also in the news discussing gun violence. Boufford wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Idaho Statesman and Long Island, New York's Newsday, about the public health effects of gun violence. “As a society, we address public health threats by identifying the root causes, reducing exposure, and instituting protective measures…  In the same way, we must protect Americans from irresponsible gun use,” she writes.

A study by RWJF Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research recipients Jason Schnittker, PhD, and Chris Uggen, PhD, finds that incarceration increases the risk of mood disorders such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and dysthymia after release. That, in turn, is strongly related to disability and increased incidence of substance abuse and impulse control disorders. United Press International, Medical Xpress and Science Day are among the outlets to report on the findings. Read an RWJF Human Capital Blog post about the study.

Liana Orsolini-Hain, PhD, RN, ANEF,FAAN, is an alumna of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Policy Fellows program (20112012), through which she worked at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Immediate Office of the Secretary. This post is part of the "Health Care in 2013" series.

My New Year’s resolution for the U.S. health system involves all of us. During my tenure as an RWJF Health Policy Fellow in the Immediate Office of the Secretary of Health, I learned how a small percentage of Americans use up a majority of health care resources.  The percentage of individuals who consume a high volume of resources will likely increase as we age, with little regard for our own level of health. 

We all need to be a part of the solution to making access to health care and access to health sustainable for current and future generations by caring about and for our own health. Do we exercise regularly? Do we get enough sleep? Do we eat fruits and vegetables every day? Have we stopped smoking? Do we manage our stress levels? Do we practice what we preach?

Myra Parker, JD, PhD, is acting instructor at the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Washington and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) New Connections grantee. This post is part of a series in which RWJF scholars, fellows and alumni who are attending the American Public Health Association annual meeting reflect on the experience.

I took my seven-year-old daughter to help me pick up my registration materials at the Moscone Center. I was thrilled to map the American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian (AI/AN/NH) sessions and discover they are located in one of the central buildings this year! It’s terrific to be able to attend the general sessions AND those specific to my community, which has not always been the case with AI/AN/NH sessions held in off-site hotels last year in Washington, D.C.

My daughter was amazed and excited to see the performances outside the convention center. The artistic displays added to the air of festivity as American Public Health Association (APHA) attendees took over the Moscone area. I was excited to see the diversity of attendees across many different professional backgrounds and ethnic/cultural communities.

We attended the American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Caucus General Membership Business Meeting. This was the first time I had the opportunity to attend the business meeting, which included officer elections for the upcoming two years, introductions of members and visitors, and updates on the caucus budget and events. The caucus was able to fund six undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students from AI/AN/NH communities to attend APHA this year at $2,000 each. This is a wonderful new opportunity for these students, each of whom also applied to present a poster at the conference. I plan to attend the caucus social on Monday evening, which includes a silent auction of native art! This fundraiser contributes to the cost of providing caucus-specific sessions as well as to the student scholarship fund. I also learned that if we pack a room at the conference, there is a higher chance the caucus will be able to offer these sessions next year.

Samir Soneji, PhD, is an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health & Society Scholars program, and an assistant professor at the Dartmouth College Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Norris Cotton Cancer Center. His study on the statistical security for Social Security was published in the August 2012 issue of Demography. Read the study.

Human Capital Blog: This study is a follow-up to your previous research. Can you briefly describe what you’ve studied up to this point?

Samir Soneji: Previously we studied the impact of historical smoking and obesity patterns on future mortality and life expectancy trends. For men there’s been a steady decline in cigarette smoking, and so also a gain in life expectancy. Women have also experienced a decline in cigarette smoking, but not as quickly. The rise in obesity has been much more recent than the historic decline in smoking, and we don’t know yet the impact of that rise. There’s a lag—the effect of today’s obesity may affect the population in 15-20 years, or later.  One possibility may be that the rise in obesity may partially offset what’s been achieved by the historic reductions in smoking. Taking these factors into account, we found that both men and women will have an increase in life expectancy in the next 25 to 30 years.

HCB: Your new study looks at the solvency of Social Security. Tell us more about what you were analyzing.

Soneji: The Social Security Administration and Medicare use the same mortality and demographic forecasts to determine the number of beneficiaries, and the number of working age adults who are contributing payroll taxes to support those retirees.

The Human Capital section of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) website is frequently updated with stories, profiles and features about the work of the scholars, fellows and grantees the Foundation supports. Check out a few of the new stories:

Grantee Triumphs Over Culture and Politics to Care for Women

When RWJF Clinical Scholar Crista Johnson, MD, realized that Somali, Sudanese, and other refugee or immigrant women who have undergone the traditional practice of female circumcision weren’t receiving desperately needed, culturally sensitive Ob-Gyn care, she checked her opinions at the door and set out to help. Today, she has created a model to help others learn how to treat circumcised women.

For Brain Injury Survivors, New Ways to Connect

RWJF Community Health Leader Fran Rooker is supporting a groundbreaking online program that brings brain injury survivors together despite distances and disabilities to help them overcome the long-term challenges that often come with their injury. Rooker’s telehealth program provides therapeutic supports, coaching, and encouragement.

Teaming Up Helps People Lose Weight

Years of research from RWJF Community Health Leader Rajiv Kumar’s successful Shape Up Rhode Island program has shown that individuals’ weight loss outcomes are significantly influenced by team factors. For instance, having multiple teammates pursuing weight loss and having supportive social interactions among those teammates improves outcomes.

Scholar Publishes "Cliffs Notes" for Colleagues on Top Medical Research

A new book published by RWJF Clinical Scholar Michael Hochman summaries 50 Studies Every Doctor Should Know, making the most influential medical research easily accessible for physicians and emphasizing findings that might help providers make better decisions.

See these stories and more on the Human Capital section of the RWJF website.