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For many patients with a serious illness or injury, the trickiest part of the recovery process is not the hospital stay—it's coming home.
"All too often, hospitals and home care agencies fail to communicate properly, leading to delays in at-home treatments," explains Hester Kenneth, MS, DNSc, a retired public health nurse, faculty member, and UCSF alumna.
She and her husband, Bob, who sits on the UCSF School of Nursing's Board of Overseers, experienced such lags first-hand. Coming home after hip surgery, Bob had to wait several days for the appointed physical therapist to arrive.
That kind of delay, Hester stresses, seriously jeopardizes a patient's chances for a smooth and speedy recovery. "Falls may take place, medication errors, any number of things," she says. "It's a real set-up for accidents."
Thus far, the problem of health care transitions has been little acknowledged and poorly understood. But a recent gift from the Kenneths to the UCSF School of Nursing is poised to change that.
Their generous $500,000 donation will create the Hester Y. and Robert J. Kenneth Endowed Chair in Health Care Transitions. The gift will fund research, training, and clinical activities related to the transitions from acute to home care settings, with the hope of ensuring that every patient receives the services he or she needs upon coming home.
"As patient advocates, nurses are uniquely positioned to understand and correct hospital-to-home care lapses," says Dean Kathy Dracup, RN, FNP, DNSc, FAAN. "Thanks to the Kenneths' incredibly generous gift, the School of Nursing will be able to take the lead in solving this urgent problem."
A dedicated public health nurse, Hester continued to teach after leaving her fulltime job to raise a family in the 1970s. She returned to school in 1979, graduating from UCSF's Doctor of Nursing Science program with an award for Distinguished Dissertation. She went on to join the faculty of the University of San Francisco School of Nursing, then to serve as the nurse researcher at Stanford University Hospital.
"Given my background in public health nursing, the focus of this gift may be surprising," she admits. "But my interest in health care transitions really reflects my life as a whole—especially my life as a mature woman concerned about the precarious passage between hospital and home."
To support the UCSF School of Nursing, contact Mark Boone at 415/502-8310 or mboone@support.ucsf.edu.
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