H.L. Perry Pepper Award Winner 2025

Research is Her Passion

Nicole Eastburn, 2025 Perry Pepper Award winner, thrives on getting answers to healthcare’s most pressing issues

By Gail O. Guterl

After one conversation with Nicole Eastburn, it’s hard to believe she has been a nurse for only 5 years.

In that short time, the Women’s Auxiliary to Chester County Hospital’s 2025 winner of the H.L. Perry Pepper Nursing Leadership Award initiated a 30-day pilot program on one of the most pressing problems in healthcare today — dealing with aggressive or violent patients. Then she turned her love of research to reducing patient falls on her unit.

Nicole, on West Wing 2 a medical/surgical floor, first heard of a screening tool “at a Magnet conference in October 2024,” she explained. “I knew Penn Medicine was investigating a system to screen for violence, so I proposed using their screening tool, DASA (Dynamic Appraisal of Situational Aggression) in the pilot on my unit.”

Right now, the 7-question assessment is a paper questionnaire (eventually it will be electronic) done by bedside nurses at every shift, asking staff to observe: is the patient easily annoyed or angered; is the patient able to tolerate the presence of others; is the patient prone to verbal outbursts; is patient angry or aggressive when asked about compliance with treatment; does the patient see the actions of others as harmful. “Every patient on our unit gets assessed to eliminate any question of bias.”

The results of the pilot are being analyzed; different interventions will be tested at CCH.

Regarding falls research, as co-chair of her unit council, Nicole was moved to action knowing West Wing 2 had a very high rate of falls. (According to the Clinics in Geriatric Medicine, some 700,000 to 1 million patients experience falls annually, leading to more than 250,000 injuries and 11,000 deaths.) “There are so many negative outcomes as a result of a patient fall in the hospital,” Nicole said. “Most important is the impact on patients’ health and often an extended hospital stay.”

The project began with education. “We had a lot of new staff and a change in management; we wanted to get everyone on the same page,” Nicole explained. “We created posters and flyers to alert everyone to the issue. Actions taken prioritized the use of bed alarms (on the middle sensitivity setting on the bed), hourly rounding and encouraging multidisciplinary team engagement. Utilizing CVM [continuous video monitoring] of patients identified as high fall risk, a unit coordinator, who is at the nurses’ station at all times, was able to catch at-risk patients trying to get out of bed without assistance and prevent a fall.”  

The project resulted in a 4-month fall-free period on West Wing 2 and an entire year when no falls resulted in a patient injury. For their efforts, the unit received the system-wide Patient Advocacy Award and the hospital’s Daisy Team Award in 2024.

With all this going on, you would be surprised to learn that Nicole does have spare time that she spends playing several instruments, including violin, piano and guitar. She loves being outdoors and uses her Longwood Gardens membership whenever she can. But right now, most of her spare time is spent studying for her master’s degree in public health, concentrating on epidemiology and biostatistics online at Temple University. She expects to be finished next year. Her thesis is a retrospective examination of the influence of socioeconomic status on length of stay and 30-day readmission rates among older adults with dementia.

As you can see, research really is Nicole Eastburn’s passion.