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Katherine Earnest, RN, a veteran nurse at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, knows that nurses contribute far beyond routine patient care. They educate patients, identify opportunities to improve outcomes, and generate innovative ideas grounded in their frontline experience. Recognizing this potential, Earnest saw an opportunity to further support nurses in bringing their ideas to life through the hospital’s Catalyst Grant program, which funds innovation across the organization.
As director of nursing research, she understood that while nurses are rich with insight, many have limited time or experience with grant writing. To help bridge that gap, she partnered with Anne Deutsch, PhD, RN, a nurse and research scientist at the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Together, they successfully applied for a Catalyst Grant to create new pathways for nurses to build research and scholarly writing skills — and the confidence to pursue their ideas.
“Nurses are in a good position to have insight into what research would benefit patients. We should be keeping research integrated with bedside care so that research priorities are aligned with what our patients tell us is important,” Earnest says. Affirms Deutsch: “Nurses should be doing research. There is a lot in healthcare that we can improve.”
Earnest and Deutsch submitted their Catalyst Grant proposal in the spring of 2024 and it was approved that summer. As part of the fellowship program they created, they would select two nurses and mentor them as they developed their project ideas. Paid for by the $18,000 grant, the research fellows also would have “protected” time each month to develop their own research and academic writing skills. Deutsch and Earnest worked hard to get the word out about the fellowship opportunity and they received over a dozen applications from the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab’s more than 300 nurses. “For a new program, I was happy with that,” says Earnest.
Amy Balas, RN, a nurse who works in a Shirley Ryan AbilityLab outpatient clinic in Chicago’s western suburbs, was intrigued when she received a general email about the new nursing research fellowship. She had previously worked at a facility that had run research studies so she knew a little about research. Balas also had been thinking about ways to better educate spinal cord injury patients about follow-up care after they are released from the hospital. “There’s only so much information a person can absorb while they’re an inpatient,” says Balas. “When they get to us at day rehabilitation, a nurse would be talking to them about something and they would be like a deer in the headlights. They would say, ‘I learned that but now I don’t remember.’”
Balas submitted her resume and a proposal to create a consolidated list of trustworthy resources for people with SCI and their care partners to turn to. After she was accepted as one of the first nursing research fellows, Balas got to work on a literature review looking at the sources of information on the internet for people living with spinal cord injuries. “I loved the discovery part of it,” she says. “I found that I hadn’t realized there was so much out there. If I was a patient with an SCI, I could see just turning off the computer and walking away.”
Balas wrote up her findings in an academic paper and refined her prose with input from her mentors. “We worked together to shape the manuscript so it flowed nicely,” says Deutsch. Balas’s article was submitted in June 2025 and has been accepted by the Rehabilitation Nursing Journal, where Deutsch is the editor-in-chief. Balas intends to present her findings at a professional conference later this year.
The overall fellowship experience was even better than Balas expected, and she says she would highly recommend it to other Shirley Ryan AbilityLab nurses. “I never felt alone or that I couldn’t reach out. You are supported so that you don’t feel like you’ve been sent out on this raft by yourself.”
For the second nursing research fellow, Earnest and Deutsch selected someone in the early stage of his career: Isaac Smith, RN, a pediatric nurse at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab’s main hospital in downtown Chicago. Smith already had thought of several topics he might want to explore some day when several of his colleagues encouraged him to apply for the fellowship.
Working with Deutsch and Earnest, Smith decided to investigate ways to better support pediatric patients with functional neurological disorder (FND), a poorly understood condition that can involve tremors, seizures, weakness and difficulty walking. In FND, brain scans typically appear normal, which can lead to patients feeling disbelieved or misunderstood. “I wanted to find language and practices that make these patients feel accepted in the medical system,” Smith says. “We want to make sure they feel safe and understood.”
Smith is currently doing a scoping review of published papers focused on the care experiences of children with FND. He is in the process of going through several hundred articles to see which ones to include in his analysis, and he hopes eventually to write and publish a paper. He also would like to present his findings to other nurses at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. “I’ve already learned a lot through this and would love to learn more and have more research opportunities,” Smith says. “It’s cool to see other ways that you can support the healthcare system as a nurse.”
Earnest and Deutsch are so pleased with the first class of research fellows that they would like to make the program permanent with funding from the hospital’s nursing budget. “When you have empowered nurses, they are happy in their jobs and more likely to stay there,” Deutsch points out. “The well-being of nurses is definitely a hot topic, and it really does connect to patient care and outcomes.”