At the 2024 AMSN Annual Convention, Nathan Way, RN, MSN, NE-BC, presented the “Texting to Improve Communication” poster, which focused on the use of text messaging among nursing staff to improve the organization’s overall Communication with Nurses Domain of the HCAHPS survey. In this Q&A, Way discusses the value of nursing research, his plans for future research, and how other medical-surgical nurses can pursue research.

What is the value of research?

Research creates new knowledge where there otherwise was no definitive knowledge. Sometimes it tells us something we never expected, and other times it validates what we already believed. Either way, it gives us definitive answers to burning clinical questions so we know where to go next for our patients.

How is your research making an impact, big or small, or how do you anticipate it will make a difference?

Clinical research, both in the general medical world and the nursing world, continues to help us sharpen our swords as clinicians. If anything is sure, it’s that the way we provide care today as medical-surgical nurses will not be the way we provide care in the next century. We must be able to clearly define the guidelines needed when it comes to areas like artificial intelligence and advanced mechanical technology.

What did you enjoy most about your poster work?

Posters give us the ability to share what we have learned, especially on the quality improvement side, with others in our field. I see it as a moral imperative to share something that is working with others in my same position, as a patient is at the center of everything we do.

Do you anticipate conducting further research on this topic, and if so, what are your next steps?

While this was a quality improvement project, as a nursing director, I will never stop working with frontline staff on opportunities to better communicate with patients and their families. In my experience, communication barriers are one of the biggest detriments to both patient safety and satisfaction. This year, I hope to submit to AMSN my work with many others in our system on the topic of care narration.

Are there other research topics that you’d like to pursue in the future, and if so, what excites you most about that potential work?

I am enrolled in a DNP program with one year to go, and for my project, I intend to work with charge nurses and nurse practitioners on shifting the focus of rapid response from a reactive triggering to proactive triggering with the support of a machine learning early warning system. I am translating the research for this evidence-based project.

What advice do you have for other medical-surgical nurses who are considering pursuing a research study?

Change will come whether you like it or not. The choice you have to make is whether you will have a relevant voice in those changes or whether you will allow them to take place without your voice. Research, quality improvement, and evidence-based interventions are available to all of us within nursing, and we need to embrace these methodologies of both creating new knowledge and carrying out interventions based on that new knowledge in the real world.