Aselage, Yap Named Claire M. Fagin Fellows by Hartford Foundation

Duke University School of Nursing assistant professors Drs. Melissa Aselage and Tracey Yap have been named 2012-2014 Claire M. Fagin Fellows by the John A. Hartford Foundation.

The Claire M. Fagin Fellowship Program focuses on nurturing and developing leaders in gerontological nursing in academic settings. This fellowship supports two years of full-time advanced research and leadership training for doctorally prepared nurses committed to careers in academic geriatric nursing. Each fellow will receive up to $120,000 to support postdoctoral research training, mentorship, leadership, and career development.

"Drs. Aselage and Yap are devoting their researcher careers to identifying the best ways to support and care for our nation’s growing population of elderly patients," said Catherine L. Gilliss, Dean and Vice Chancellor for Nursing Affairs at Duke University School of Nursing. “The results of their research will inform the care provided by nurses in the future.”

Dr. Yap is a Senior Fellow in the Duke University Center for Aging and Human Development. Her research focuses on understanding and improving nursing care processes and the care of older adults. In a recently completed study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01008254), Dr. Yap demonstrated the effectiveness of a cost-effective, nurse-led intervention to reduce incidence and prevalence of pressure ulcers in long-term care facilities by increasing resident mobility through a prompting system specifically tailored to each facility using musical cues. In the course of this study, the research team recognized that the occupational subculture of nursing in each facility played an important role in implementing the intervention, a discovery which led to the development of a new tool to assess nursing culture. Refining the Nursing Culture Assessment Tool specifically to pressure ulcer prevention processes will be the focus for her Hartford fellowship funding.

Dr. Aselage is a 2009-2011 John A. Hartford Foundation Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity (BAGNC) Scholar and a Senior Fellow in the Duke University Center for Aging and Human Development. She completed her PhD in nursing and a Post-Master’s Certificate in nurse education at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Nursing in August 2011. She is a Family Nurse Practitioner and has worked in long-term care and geriatric primary care since 1996. Her dissertation, which focused on alleviating mealtime difficulties in older adults with dementia, received a Distinguished Dissertation Award from the 2011 Southern Research Nursing Society/Aging Research Interest Group. The focus of her Hartford postdoctoral funding is to compare three hand-feeding techniques used to provide assistance for persons with dementia.

About DUSON
Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON), as a diverse community of scholars and clinicians, educates the next generation of transformational leaders in nursing, advances nursing science in issues of global import, and fosters the scholarly practice of nursing. In 2011, US News and World Report ranked Duke among the top seven graduate schools of nursing in the nation. The School offers masters, PhD, and doctor of nursing practice degrees, as well as an accelerated bachelor of science in nursing degree to students who have previously completed an undergraduate degree. More than 800 individuals enrolled for Spring 2012 classes, the largest number of students in the School’s 80-year history.