Penn Nursing’s Linda Aiken, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor in Nursing and director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery.

The honor reflects Dr. Aiken’s pioneering research in the field of nursing care and safe staffing. She developed the RN4CAST project, a study examining how organizational features of hospital care impact nurse recruitment, retention and patient outcomes. The project is the largest study of its kind, examining nursing care practices in the United States, Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia and Chile. The study has produced remarkable evidence of the importance of a smaller patient-to-nurse ratio in improving patient outcomes. She documented that 30-day mortality after common surgical procedures increased by seven percent for each additional patient added to a nurse’s workload. The study also concluded that patients in hospitals with higher proportions of nurses with bachelor’s degrees have better patient outcomes including lower risk adjusted mortality.

The conferring took place during a ceremony in late February to open the 38th Annual International Nursing and Midwifery Research and Education Conference, which took place at RCSI.