May 2003
Volume 16, Number 5
Jacqueline Dunbar-Jacob is the dean of the school of nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. Dunbar-Jacobs was the founding director of the university's Center for Nursing Research. Her research focuses on patient adherence to treatment and work on studies related to AIDS, rheumatology, cardiovascular risk factors, cancer screening, and transplantation.
Nursing is a discipline that routinely addresses pa-tient care and is concerned with the behavior and adjustment or coping of individuals and families. There are varying levels of nursing certification and practitioners are sent out at undergraduate and graduate levels. The education and research programs in schools of nursing reflect those varying levels. While there is an increasing amount of basic laboratory science in nursing, the bulk of the research is clinical. In many ways, nursing is similar to health psychology with an emphasis, however, on both physical and psychological care.
From the time of my undergraduate education, I was pulled between nursing and psychology. My undergraduate curriculum was filled with courses from both, but I graduated with my BS in nursing and migrated into psychiatric nursing. When I entered my doctoral program, my interests in behavior naturally led me to psychology. I completed a program in counseling psychology at Stanford University with a dissertation that merged the two backgrounds - adherence to pharmacological treatment.
Since then, my academic appointments have been in either medicine or nursing. My research interests have remained in patient adherence. The dual discipline training has been a significant asset. Bringing both of my disciplines to bear on the problem has opened doors to collaborations with others. Sitting within a school of nursing has further facilitated that interdisciplinary perspective. When there is a link between disciplines, there is an expansion of thinking that is fun, creative and productive.
One of the interesting things about nursing is, because of its practice settings, interdisciplinary collaborations are second nature. There is a common language and perspective between the health professions that facilitates these collaborations. Bringing a psychological perspective into this setting is generally well accepted and leads to very interesting interactions. For example, I collaborate with medicine, pharmacy, occupational therapy, psychology (health, neuro, clinical, social), public health, biostatistics, and nursing, as well as robotics, computer science, and engineering in my own projects. One of the advantages to sitting in a non-traditional department is the synergy that develops among faculty from diverse disciplines. Maintaining identity is perhaps the most difficult aspect of such a placement and requires continual work.
