Ruth Bryant’s Three Minute Thesis
Protecting Patients from Harm: A New Paradigm for Pressure Ulcers
Each year in the United States, more than 2.5 million patients develop a complication completely unrelated to the illness that brought them to the hospital or to their doctor’s office. That complication is known as a pressure ulcer….or bedsore. A bedsore is the loss of skin over a bone such as the hip or tailbone and develops when a person is unable to shift their weight or reposition and can happen in as few as 4-6 hours. It can be as deep as the muscle and, in many cases, down to bone. Pressure ulcers take weeks and months to heal, require additional nursing care and put the patient at risk for developing complications unrelated to the reason for which they were originally seeking health care. These complications include infection, prolonged hospital stay, having to be discharged to a long term care facility, readmission to the hospital and death. My research will identify the most common conditions that predict these complications in the patient with a pressure ulcer. By doing this I will be to target patients who need extra precautions both to prevent a pressure ulcer as well as to prevent the complications if they do develop a pressure ulcer, thus creating a new paradigm for pressure ulcer prevention.
Nursing
Ruth Bryant, currently completing her PhD in Nursing at Washington State University. Ruth completed her Masters of Science in Nursing at the University of Minnesota and is an expert in the care of patients with a wound, ostomy or incontinence. Ruth has a national and international reputation in WOC (wound, ostomy, continence) nursing. She has been involved in teaching WOC nursing for the past 30 years beginning with the WOC Nursing Education Program at Abbott Northwestern where she had a joint Faculty/CNS position and later became Program Director. In 2000, Ruth co-founded and created the first online program to teach WOC nursing (www.webWOCnurse.com) thus opening the door for nurses to attend regardless of where they lived. She was the Program Director for 10 years. She is the founding editor of the textbook “Acute and Chronic Wounds: Current Management Concepts”, now in its 5th edition, and received the AJN Medical-Surgical Book of the Year Award in 2012. She was President of the Wound Ostomy Continence Nurses (WOCN) Society for four years and is currently on the Board of Directors for the American Association for Wound Care (AAWC) and the Delta Chi Chapter-at-Large of Sigma Theta Tau International.
Currently Ruth is the Washington State University Nursing Scholar In Residence (SIR) for Providence Health Care (which includes Sacred Heart Medical Center and Children’s Hospital and Holy Family Hospital) where she consults with nurses to facilitate their participation in developing and conducting clinical research. Ruth also works as a WOC nurse in a “supplemental” position at Sacred Heart Medical Center. In addition to completing her dissertation research, Ruth is the Co-PI for Sigma Theta Tau funded research project: “Exploring patient engagement to reduce harm in hospitalized patients.”