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Two Graduate School of Nursing PhD students defended their dissertations via Zoom in early April. Both nursing students said they had positive experiences presenting through a screen, despite it being different from the norm of prior years.
“Surprisingly, I liked doing this from home,” said Joanne Lewis, ACNP-BC. For nearly 12 years, Lewis has worked as a nurse practitioner in the general surgery department at UMass Memorial Medical Center. “Of course we all want to celebrate with our community, but it was nice to be in my own surroundings. I also got to talk with my whole family on Zoom afterwards. My family would’ve never been able to come to an in person presentation, so this worked out.”
“While it would have been nice to shake everyone’s hand, I was able to showcase my months of work while being in the comfort of my home, which was new and nice,” said GSN classmate Cassandra Godzik, APRN, PMHNP-BC. Godzik is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College for the next three years.
“I’m also rather used to online communication,” Godzik said. “I do a lot of video conferencing with patients, so I felt confident and familiar when it was my time to present!”
Lewis’s dissertation is focused on safe storage and disposal of unused opioids after general surgery. She studied how to teach patients to safely and effectively get rid of medication following a procedure, and she developed an intervention video to do so.
“It covered the opioid crisis as a whole, and the importance of storing pills the right way,” she said. “I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to talk to patients about this, and give information on how to store and dispose. A lot of people said they were getting information from the pharmacy or signs posted on business doors. I hope this highlights that we need more information and more studies around this.”
She plans to submit her study to the Journal of Surgical Research, and said she may eventually disseminate her video to be used among patient populations.
Godzik looked closely at sleep patterns in older populations in her dissertation research. She examined the feasibility of an online cognitive behavioral therapy program to improve insomnia, mood and quality of life in bereaved adults ages 55 and older. Her participants were randomized to receive either a 6-week online CBT-I program or six weeks of online psychoeducational modules on insomnia and grief.
“We didn’t see a difference between the official CBT-I therapy program, versus the control intervention program that I created,” said Godzik. “Everyone in both groups seemed to improve, so this suggests that it is feasible to recruit bereaved adults for an online educational program, and that insomnia symptoms improve after engaging with content in an online modality.”
The work that both Lewis and Godzik perform day to day is being impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As full-time nursing professionals, they say that the virus led to drastic adjustments in their research as well as their lives.
“We’ve been deployed in waves, working in the COVID units,” said Lewis. “It’s all I can think about right now. I think it’s derailed the momentum of continuing my research because everything has been shifted to a focus of how to keep people alive.”
“The number of people needing psychological services is growing astronomically right now,” said Godzik. “People are losing their jobs, encountering new experiences with their families, trapped in the house. I do worry about the psycho-social impacts in the future, regarding anxiety and mood.”
“It’s challenging, but we will get through this,” said Godzik.
