Welcome to The Cheryl Spencer Institute of Nursing Research

Towards Better Health and Health Care for All.

The Cheryl Spencer Institute for Nursing Research is the first nursing center in Israel devoted to research and located within an academic department. The Center’s main goal is to identify, examine and analyze complex issues involving nurses and nursing science, their clinical practice, and their professional evolution, as well as to develop innovative practices and health care delivery systems that increase the quality of health care services provided to the community and to the individual.  To accomplish these lofty goals, the Center is ready to lead broad-based, multidisciplinary, and multi-national studies that strengthen, inform and expand the field of nursing.

Spotlight on a Research

Orly Tonkikh is a PhD student in the Cheryl Spencer Department of nursing, supervised by Prof. Efrat Shadmi and Prof. Anna Zisberg. Her dissertation focuses on the association between nursing staffing and processes and functional outcomes of hospitalized older patients. Older adults are frequently hospitalized in general medicine units and are at high risk for a host of long-term negative hospitalization outcomes, predominantly functional decline. Nurses are the front-line personnel responsible for implementing functioning-preserving interventions. Yet whether infrastructures of organizing nursing care contributes to functional outcomes is unclear. Recent findings in Orly’s PhD study, examined the relationship between nursing relational continuity (the extent of different nurses assigned to take care of each patient during the hospital stay) and functional outcomes, showed that patients that were cared for more different nurses during the hospitalization (lower weighted sum of squared frequencies of shifts that each nurse was assigned to care for the patient) were at higher risk of decline in cognitive functioning and were less satisfied with the hospital care experience. These findings suggest relational continuity as a potential modifiable factor that could play a role in preserving the cognitive functioning of hospitalized older adults. These results were presented in the 2019 Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Scientific Meeting and awarded the Health Sciences Person-in-Training Award.