Meghan Potthoff

Discipline: Nurse

Funding awarded to: Creighton University

Pediatric Palliative Care Conversation Toolkit for the Chronic Critically Ill (CCI

The objective of this mixed methods project is to develop and evaluate a toolkit that provides a structure for palliative care conversations for the families of CCI children in the ICU settings, with the exploratory objective to evaluate the effectiveness of integrating an academic nurse scientist into a clinical palliative care team. The central hypothesis is that the Chronic Critically Ill Palliative Care Conversation modular toolkit will improve family perception of quality of communication and their capacity to provide care to their child. The patient population for this study will be the families and children suffering from CCI in the intensive care setting. Once the modules have been designed, implemented, and evaluated locally, they will be made available via open-access nationally to help improve care for this population.

“My goal is to become a leading doctorally prepared nurse scientist that is integrated into an interdisciplinary clinical team. I am most excited about the Cambria Sojourn Leadership Award being open to all disciplines as I believe a cohort of scholars would bring such keen discipline-informed perspective to my project as we discuss and energize one another's work in our seminars and sessions together. I do not envision this as a nurse project but instead as a team project. As a faculty member in the College of Nursing, I foster a team science setting in our curriculum. As a nurse practitioner, I foster the upbringing and mentoring of junior nurse practitioners to include hosting palliative care education lectures and didactics around difficult cases. I look forward to learning from my Sojourn colleagues across disciplines on how best to lead within and across our fields.”