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Welcome to Dr. Lynn D’Esmond’s Research Website at UMass Dartmouth

Research Interests
  • Distracted Practice

As a nursing leader whose practice has primarily been in the acute care setting, my focus is continually on patient and staff safety and improving outcomes.  While in my PhD program and working in Quality and Risk Management, my primary focus was on errors and finding ways to avoid them. This led to an in depth look at the area of distractions that was found to be a precursor to many preventable errors and events.

The healthcare literature, to date, has blurred the term distractions with interruptions and so a concept analysis was undertaken to define distracted practice. This was followed with a qualitative descriptive study to look at the distracted practice experience of nurses, physicians, and pharmacists in the acute care setting in order to understand and describe this human experience, its attributes as well as characteristics and develop a model for future study.  Currently the team is working to develop a valid and reliable tool to measure one’s tendency to distracted practice and is being funded through an NIH Grant.

Visit Research and Publications for a more in depth look of our research projects.