U.S. nursing research institute appoints dentist as interim director
The National Institute for Nursing Research, which disburses federal grants, recently announced that its interim director would be...a dentist. But non-nurses are non-qualified to evaluate grants for nursing research. And the appointment reinforces the inaccurate stereotype that nurses are unskilled handmaidens, rather than autonomous health professionals.
In August 2019, a dentist and a biologist were appointed interim director and deputy director of the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR), after the resignation of Ann Cashion, PhD, RN, FAAN. NINR is the division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health that makes grants for nursing research, and its FY 2019 budget was about $163 million. It should be obvious that non-nurses are in no position to ably perform these important nursing jobs. Would NIH appoint a nurse to oversee dental research funding? But what may be less obvious is the damage such appointments cause to nursing as a whole. They wrongly suggest that nursing is not a distinct health profession, but something anyone with some health-related background can do.
In fact, nursing is an autonomous profession with a unique knowledge base and scope of practice. Nurses are educated by nurses, licensed by nursing bodies, and supervised by nurses in the clinical setting. Nurses independently engage in 24/7 surveillance to detect and resolve life-threatening problems. And nurses spend many years obtaining doctorates in nursing so they can pursue their own ground-breaking research, sometimes with funding granted by NINR. The idea that a non-nurse could competently oversee an elite nursing institution or evaluate proposals for nursing research with a view to spending taxpayer dollars on them presents a threat to both nursing and society. Most decision-makers do not understand the value of nursing or know that nurses save lives. So nurses do not receive enough respect or resources. Clinical nurses are understaffed, threatening patients' lives. Many nursing faculty are also overworked and underpaid. The stereotype of nurses as low-skilled handmaidens who need physicians to oversee them remains common, fueled by the news media and of course Hollywood. (We admit that suggesting nurses need dentists and biologists to oversee them is an innovation.) But damaging ideas about nursing can also be fueled by public sector leaders who make high-profile decisions that reinforce these inaccurate stereotypes, as this one by NIH does. Please join our campaign to urge NIH to reverse these interim appointments and immediately appoint qualified nursing leaders instead!
Okay, but then what you are saying overall with this ^ comment, is that the person should have a PhD in a discipline that is core to the nature of the research.
Not trying to argue, but I think people (in whatever discipline) would tend to have a natural concern about things other than just having a director with the technical qualifications to sign off on clinical trials.
That person could also be expected to be making decisions about what research is going to be funded, for example, and what kind of efforts or research is deemed worthy of pursuing in the first place. For reasons like that I think it's natural to want someone who has some sort of skin in the game that directly relates to the profession in question.
Well it is the NIH, the premier research organization in the USA. I think they are very capable of deciding who should chair a department. You are though, free to disagree from your given place.
A PhD nurse would be appropriate depending on what the PhD is in. The key here is that the director has to be well versed in the research process. The people at the NIH design clinical trials and then porifice the data The PhD would most likely have to be in one of the basi sciences-- Biochem, Pharmacology, Physical Chemistry, Analytical Chem etc etc Not many nurses have those PhDs as their undegrad education does not have the core sciences to qualify them for those grad programs.
Physician with a PhD in the sciences who could sign off on clinical trials in this case
You seem to profess expertise in all sorts of areas: Research, dentistry, anesthesia, NIH. A nurse with a PhD can and often does oversee clinical trials. Nursing PhDs and PhDs are highly variable in their individual expertise depending on their core courses and research. The clinical trials are most often performed in multidisciplinary teams of individuals especially at the NIH. It wouldn’t matter if a physician needed to sign off on the trial or not the physician would be part of the multidisciplinary team.
You seem to profess expertise in all sorts of areas: Research, dentistry, anesthesia, NIH. A nurse with a PhD can and often does oversee clinical trials. Nursing PhDs and PhDs are highly variable in their individual expertise depending on their core courses and research. The clinical trials are most often performed in multidisciplinary teams of individuals especially at the NIH. It wouldn’t matter if a physician needed to sign off on the trial or not the physician would be part of the multidisciplinary team.
Rodman
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Well it is the NIH, the premier research organization in the USA. I think they are very capable of deciding who should chair a department. You are though, free to disagree from your given place.