Press Release
ASHP Foundation and American Nurses Foundation Award $75,000 in Research Grant Funding
The ASHP Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Collaborative Care Grant for Nurses and Pharmacists. The competitive grant program, offered in partnership with the American Nurses Foundation, supports innovative projects co-led by nursing and pharmacy to stimulate and demonstrate the impact of team-based care that enhances the safe and effective use of medications.
The 2023 recipients are Kathryn A. Walker, PharmD, BCPS, FAAHPM, and Christine Marie Hallman, DNP, APRN, ACHPN, NP-C, for their proposal, “Implementation of a Standardized Patient-Centered, Team-Based Deprescribing Assessment Within Community-Based Palliative Care Program: A Feasibility Study.”
According to Walker and Hallman, “This study seeks to implement a standardized, patient-centered, team-based deprescribing process in our diverse community-based palliative care PATCH (Palliative Telehealth Connecting to Home) Program to ensure all patients can benefit from careful medication alignment to their goals of care.”
“The ASHP Foundation congratulates Dr. Walker and Dr. Hallman as the 2023 recipients of the Collaborative Care Research Grant,” said Steven A. Rubloff, chief executive officer of the ASHP Foundation. “This research expands team-based palliative care services into the community while also examining patient-level factors that may influence deprescribing.”
“Dr. Hallman and Dr. Walker’s work is inspirational and groundbreaking. We must transform traditional notions of health care delivery and improve patient care while overcoming health disparities within communities. It remains a profound honor to support collaborative innovation among nurses and pharmacists through our valued partnership with ASHP Foundation,” said American Nurses Foundation Executive Director, Kate Judge.
This study will help “establish a new model of team-based deprescribing in an underserved, community-based, palliative care population by incorporating a structured approach within the standard clinical workflow.” In the future, the study “can serve as a resource to other teams caring for patients with serious illness, providing insight into patient/family experiences and thereby filling a gap within the existing body of literature.”
Dr. Walker is an Assistant Vice President at MedStar Health and an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. She specializes in palliative care services, end-of-life medication use, and education of health professionals in providing quality end-of-life care. Her passion for alleviating suffering drives her efforts in pain management, clinical practice, research, and education.
Dr. Hallman is the primary nurse practitioner for the community-based telehealth PATCH program for Medstar Health Washington Hospital Center, where she works as part of an interprofessional care team to ensure that patients in the PATCH program receive care that is both medically appropriate and aligned with the overall goals of the patients living with a serious, life-limiting illness.
Additional information about the grant is available at ashpfoundation.org/CCG.