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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Assistant Professor Janiece Taylor, PhD, RN, thinks back to the clinical nurse who she once was, who loved caregiving but wrestled with doubt and struggled to treat pain at a nursing home. She wishes she could have been there in spirit to reassure that nurse, “Don’t give up.”
Something good was coming.
“One summer I wanted to get out of New Mexico—I was just young and wanted to travel,” and the University of Texas-Austin had a program teaching undergraduate students about nursing research. She was hooked. Staying at UT-Austin for the PhD program, she began to fall for teaching as well. She says watching students grow, “and knowing I had something to do with that … it’s pretty amazing.”
Today, as a developing researcher (“I consider myself so new in the area of pain research”), Taylor lets frustration drive her instead of holding her back. And once again, she feels something good is on the way in the form of her pilot project “working with people in their homes to tailor strategies to help them address their pain above and beyond pharmacology.” She’s got footsteps to follow.
“Hopkins is so much a team effort,” Taylor explains, pointing to colleagues Sarah Szanton, PhD, ANP, FAAN, and Laura Gitlin, PhD, and their success on aging in place and non-pharmaceutical treatment of dementia, respectively. “They address things with that different lens. There is so much room for that in pain research as well. … Because pain really is outside the box.”