#MeetUsMonday - Meet Professor Kelley Anderson

Meet Kelley.

Master cook and pie maker. Loves yoga, jogging, gardening, improving her Japanese, and the 27-acre Afton farm where she lives with her family. Long-time ICU nurse who worked on burn and cardiac units before becoming a family nurse practitioner who got interested in helping people with chronic conditions improve the quality of their lives.

Recipient of a $446K R21 NIH/NINR grant focused on patients with heart failure and a $300K Humana Foundation grant that will establish a Nelson County-based program offering food, shopping, counseling, and lifestyle “prescriptions” and support for older adults 65 and up with hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. Teaches Scholarly Writing course to PhD students. 

HER PATH TO NURSING

“I must’ve been about five years old, and my family and I were on a camping trip and a little boy in front of me pulled his fishing line back and caught his worm and hook right in my eye. There was a nurse there at the lake, and she took care of me, got the hook out, and told me everything was going to be all right—and it really was. I never forgot her and what she did for me.

“My iris is still scarred. My sister calls it my lucky eye.”

BECOMING AN ICU NURSE

“I did my first externship on a neurology intensive care unit, and, during my 4th year as a BSN student at UVA, worked in the burn unit, and absolutely loved it. I loved the EKGs, the technical part of it, the high-speed adrenaline and complexity of really sick patients, and the way people worked together. On the burn unit especially, we were such a cohesive group.

“Being in the ICU for a long time, though, I started to wonder: ‘How can I keep people out of here?’ I became a family nurse practitioner, which is much more prevention focused.”

PATIENTS WHO STAYED WITH HER

“There was an older woman, she had very bad aortic valve disease, and was lying in bed, short of breath. She wanted ice cream, which is not a component of the low-fat cardiac diet she was on. She asked, ‘Does it really matter anymore?’ We came up with a solution that everyone could feel good about.

“It was a moment for me. There’s a point where we have to prioritize different things, and that idea has led to some of my work in advanced illness in patients with heart failure. It’s patients such as that woman who taught me and who make us stop and think about what we do so routinely, and whether that routine response always make sense.”

HER NURSING SCIENCE

“When working as a nurse practitioner in cardiology, we usually did the admission workup, and discharge. Heart failure was and is the most common reason why people over age 65 are hospitalized, so there’s a lot of these patients who return. I’d notice that I would be readmitting the same person I’d just discharged two or three weeks ago. I’d think, ‘This is interesting. Are we really helping people by hospitalizing them? What are we doing and what can we do differently?’ That work became my dissertation and research focus.

“I’m deeply interested in helping people living with heart failure who experience high symptom burden, poor quality of life, and half of whom won’t survive two years after hospitalization. The R21 NIH grant is enrolling 120 patients with heart failure who are being released from the hospital to home, a subset of whom will be interviewed to identify what factors, including social determinants of health, influence their ability to achieve goal-concordant care and the barriers that inhibit it.

“A lot of times we have to make decisions not because it is their care goal, but because it’s what’s practical for them and their family. It’s a decision based not so much on their disease process, but the conditions around them. We’re beginning to develop and design some interventions around that.”

UVA SCHOOL OF NURSING IN A WORD?

“ENDURING. One of the things I’ve re-noticed here is that the quality of the work is so high. And even though that’s the case, it’s still done in a collaborative and enjoyable way. This has always stayed with me from UVA, and it’s still how I run my teams. We’re working hard, but we support and encourage each other. So many of us who graduate from UVA felt that . . . that there’s something here that’s just very different. I don’t know how to articulate it. It’s just something you feel that always stay with you.”

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