News Release

Morgan Wins IMPACT Award for Research Benefiting North Carolina

March 12, 2004

Jennifer Craft Morgan, Research Scientist at the Institute on Aging, has been awarded an IMPACT Award by the Graduate School at UNC Chapel Hill. The award recognizes the significant impact of her doctoral work and related research on improving the jobs of direct care workers in long term care.

The IMPACT Awards recognize and showcase graduate student research that has a direct impact on the state of North Carolina. The awards were established to celebrate the Graduate School's 100th anniversary, and they continue to be funded by the Graduate Education Advancement Board.

Morgan's research was conducted while she was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, a pre-doctoral fellow in the Carolina Program in Healthcare and Aging Research (CPHAR) at the UNC Institute on Aging, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Her research used data from the Workforce Improvement for Nursing Assistants: Supporting Training, Education and Payment for Upgrading Performance (WIN A STEP UP) project, which focuses on improving the situation of nursing assistants in the long-term care industry in North Carolina. Morgan served as the WIN A STEP UP Project Coordinator.

The WIN A STEP UP project is a creative, effective, and award-winning approach to solving a difficult problem in North Carolina, and potentially nationwide. Throughout the United States, there is a crisis in the provision of health care for the elderly, and a significant component of this crisis is due to a shortage of nurses and nursing assistants. In North Carolina, where Morgan's research is being conducted, the turnover rate of nursing assistants working in nursing homes is about 100% annually.

Results from WIN A STEP UP have been impressive; the project has successfully increased job satisfaction among nursing assistants and demonstrated a reduction of turnover for participants in the project as compared to non-participants. To date the WIN A STEP UP project has been implemented in 44 nursing homes with about 500 nursing assistants participating in the continuing education curriculum and receiving payments tied to the completion of the classes and the completion of a retention contract. The success of the program has led to funding to continue and expand the efforts.

Victor Marshall and Kenneth Bollen, both faculty in the Department of Sociology, are Morgan's co-advisors. Marshall recommended her for the IMPACT award, saying, "This is research that clearly makes a difference for the people of North Carolina."

IMPACT Award winners will receive a cash prize and recognition during The Graduate School's Annual Student Recognition Event on April 7.