Federal dollars are driving new tools and discoveries at Penn Nursing, highlighting just how much innovation is at stake when national support shifts.
2 min. read
How do people end up in the hospital, and why do some of them end up passing away during their hospitalizations? The question might conjure images of cardiac emergencies or respiratory crises, but one of the deadliest leading causes—sepsis—is broadly underrecognized. “It’s the body’s response to an infection, but it’s not just an infection,” says Kathryn H. Bowles, Penn Nursing’s van Ameringen Chair in Nursing Excellence.
Surviving sepsis is a victory, but many patients face lingering risks of reinfection and hospital readmission. Spotting this gap, Bowles turned her focus to sepsis survivorship, developing interventions to protect patients and families from prolonged recoveries or preventable deaths. Her research reveals that just 4% of patients discharged to home health care had sepsis documented in their electronic records, highlighting a critical communication gap her team is now working to close.
“We’re working hard with health systems to build alerts into the records that designate patients as sepsis survivors,” Bowles explains. “Most impactfully, we petitioned the CDC for a new diagnosis code for sepsis survivors, so we can label them in their records and target their continued care. Prior to our work here, there was no way to formally identify them after discharge.”
This targeted remediation of a critical oversight in the health care landscape wouldn’t have been possible without fiscal and institutional support from the federal government. Bowles is one of the seven Penn Nursing researchers whose work is featured in the “Nurse-Led. Evidence-Driven. Future-Focused.” video series that showcases the great extent to which Penn’s nurse scientists are now addressing challenges that millions of patients and their families still collide with each year. Federal funding, vulnerable to changes in political headwinds, is crucial to continuing these much-needed innovations and interventions.
“Continued investment in nursing science matters, and this new video series highlights the impactful work that our faculty are doing to transform health and reimagine our collective future,” says says Margaret Bond Simon Dean of Nursing Antonia M. Villarruel. She has encouraged the profession to respond with alignment and clarity, pressing for a shared framework. That disciplined, unified voice helped catalyze a broader national effort to underscore the value of nursing research.
Historically, federal funding and collaboration with institutions like the National Institutes of Health have yielded better preventative and clinical outcomes for patients whose vulnerabilities or struggles were habitually overlooked. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t get federal funding for firearm safety research because it was prohibited by the CDC,” Villarruel says. “But by engaging policymakers and framing this issue as a public health matter—with key insights from Penn researchers who were working in communities and alongside interdisciplinary colleagues—we were able to shift the agenda.”
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