Ruth A. Anderson

My research program is concerned with understanding and improving nursing management practices and their impact on outcomes, with a particular interest in resident outcomes in nursing homes. I use complexity science, organizational and nursing theory to bring together the constructs of communication and decision processes, relationship and interaction, organizational structures, context, resource allocation and health care outcomes. In my most recently NIH/NINR funded study, “Outcomes of Nursing Management Practice in Nursing Homes,” I worked with a multidisciplinary team to explore relationship patterns and management practices that enable nursing homes to attain high quality resident outcomes in a series of eight comparative case studies, identifying management practices that are distributed through all levels of workers and appear to build capacity for high quality outcomes. From this work, we developed a new intervention for improving staff interactions and information exchange in long term care settings. I now engaged with this multidisciplinary team in a VA-Funded study to test the intervention for its impact on reducing patient falls. I have expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Professor Emerita in the School of Nursing · 2015 - Present School of Nursing

Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Aging · 1998 - Present Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, Institutes and Centers

Education, Training & Certifications

University of Texas, Austin · 1987 Ph.D.

University of Pennsylvania · 1981 M.S.N.