• Key Area of Focus 3: Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations in Nursing
• Key Area of Focus 4: Health Services and Practice

• Micro-system care delivery models
• Multi-professional care delivery dynamics
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to identifying and measuring care delivery dynamics

• Center for Nursing Philosophy

Miriam Bender received her PhD in Nursing Science in May 2013 from the University of San Diego Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science, and joined the UCI Program in Nursing Science as an Assistant Professor in November 2014. Dr. Bender’s research focuses on the relationships between the organization of care delivery, multi-professional practice dynamics, and patient care quality and safety outcomes. Care delivery foci include transitional and acute care models. Her most recent work seeks to characterize, measure, explain and evaluate an innovative model that integrates a new role, the clinical nurse leader (CNL), into nursing care delivery microsystems. This includes the development and empirical validation of a model for CNL practice that begins to elucidate the mechanisms by which CNL-integrated care delivery improves care quality and patient safety outcomes. The model is currently being tested in diverse health systems across the country. This work has required advances in theoretical and methodological approaches to examine healthcare delivery, and attention to the ways healthcare data are generated and interpreted to measure healthcare delivery and outcomes. Implications include the identification of valid approaches to better understand the mechanisms of action for a variety of care models and to develop meaningful tools to measure their impact on care quality and safety. The goal is to produce a strong conceptual and empirical evidence base for models of care delivery that consistently impact care quality and safety patient outcomes and can be taken up across the healthcare spectrum.

Additional info on the UCI Faculty Profile System