Matthew McHugh
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
When patients are hospitalized, their outcomes depend not only on which treatments they receive but also on the setting in which nurses deliver care. That setting includes whether there are enough nurses, whether nurses have the authority to act on their judgment, how well clinicians work as a team, and whether frontline nurses have a voice in hospital decisions.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
nurse work environment
nurse staffing
nurse-to-patient ratios
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- Determine whether organizational changes in nursing, such as staffing and work environment reforms, have lasting effects on patient outcomes and cost, using a panel of hospitals, nurse surveys and patient data from 7 states going back to 1999.
- Evaluate whether policies such as California's nurse-to-patient ratios and New York's staffing committees, and innovations such as Magnet recognition, had sustained impact through challenges like COVID-19.
- Test whether nurse work environments and staffing affect outcomes for hospitalized older adults with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, using linked data from more than 300 New York and Illinois hospitals across four time points.
- Identify the hospitals with the best outcomes for dementia patients and collect qualitative data from their nurses to explain and contextualize the statistical findings.
More about the research
Both projects ask how these changeable features of the nurse work environment affect patient outcomes. They also ask how hospitals and policymakers could improve them. The projects draw on large surveys of nurses linked to patient outcome data from the same hospitals.
Why it matters
The findings could guide hospital reform and nursing policy, such as staffing ratios, staffing committees and Magnet-style work environment changes, toward safer and more effective care. Patients across all ages and settings could benefit. This includes hospitalized older adults living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, who are especially vulnerable to delirium, falls and losing the ability to return home.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Monica O'Reilly-Jacob
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify people living with dementia who receive care from nurse practitioners serving as main or ancillary primary care providers, by correcting Medicare claims for incident-to billing and applying the Primary Care Provider Identification Algorithm (PCP-IA).
Huiwen Xu
Emory University, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine whether Black and Hispanic nursing home residents with dementia have less access to Alzheimer's special care units, using decomposition methods on Medicare claims and resident assessments for 819,415 newly admitted long-stay residents across 15,305 facilities.
Maria Alva
Georgetown University, DC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compile a database of Medicaid managed care organization and state program features over 2016-2025, organized by a healthcare conceptual framework, that could plausibly influence the quality of type 2 diabetes care.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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