Beth Black, PhD, RN
Assistant Professor Dr. Beth Black has received funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research at NIH for her grant entitled “End-of-Life Care After Severe Fetal Diagnosis.” The grant is for $407,000 over 2 years to study the implementation of a perinatal palliative care program at the UNC Center for Maternal and Infant Health, and responses to a life-threatening fetal diagnosis by women, their partners and health care providers. Dr. Margarete Sandelowski, Cary C. Boshamer Professor, is a co-investigator and Dean Kristen M. Swanson is a research adviser to the study.
“We need to learn how to support these families in the best way possible. The way to learn is to talk to them, to find out what they need, identify their grief trajectory, and find out how they do after the loss,” Dr. Black says. In the long term, Dr. Black wants her work to provide a good theoretical foundation for the development of interventions for these families. She also wants to align perinatal issues with the end of life care issues conceptually. “I’m really committed to the care of these families. I want to find out from them and from their providers how we can best care for them in this heartbreaking situation.”
Look for more on Dr. Black’s work in the next issue of Carolina Nursing magazine.
