Elon Musk is not one, but two, four letter words… The global businessman is causing ongoing waves across the federal landscape in his quest to reign in federal government spending through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This effort continues to have far reaching effects on health science – including impacts on units and investigators that are close and longstanding partners to those of us in the School of Nursing. History, and likely the judiciary, will have the final evaluative word of these efforts; though nestled much closer to the T Wing of the Magnuson Health Sciences Building, the Office for Nursing Research & Innovation has engaged in a timely and careful review of our work in response to these efforts to ensure the highest stewardship of WA state, federal and university resources. Each week, we intentionally close the Weekly Research Roundup with our guiding principles. To fully manifest our commitment to accountability, collaboration, and service orientation, we want to share that review with our community.
Our mission is to elevate nursing science across the research lifecycle. It is a mission everyone on our team derives immense satisfaction in carrying out. In FY25, our operating budget for is $1.76M and is proposed to be $1.74M for FY26. In FY24, our team supported extramural awards of approximately $33.5M in our grant portfolio. This comprises more than 150 award budgets across three continents, which employ dozens if not hundreds of research staff around the globe. This portfolio exceeds the School of Nursing’s annual operating budget ($23.6M), indicating that our research enterprise eclipses our educational enterprise.
One marker of a unit’s efficiency is their output divided by input (time, money, and raw materials). Though these numbers are rough approximations, using the total portfolio size as the output and our unit’s total annual budget as the input, we yield a ~19-fold return on investment. Now, this is just a quantitative measure, and ignores the impact on science, the community and human beings whose lives are touched by the innovations being developed through these grants – which many of us place superior value on.
Indeed, the public service orientation of our work may be better characterized by its effectiveness. The hardest part of determining a unit’s effectiveness is choosing the corresponding measures of that effectiveness. Is it the total or year-over-year growth of grant dollars we support? Satisfaction in our services? The proportion of faculty who submit, manage or are being funded, in some part, by research grants? Diversity of our schools’ grant and sponsored projects portfolio?
While we hope the ongoing strategic planning process will identify highly valued indicators of the effectiveness of the Office for Nursing Research & Innovation, the internal metrics we use are the total dollar amount of grants supported ($33.5M), growth in the number of grants submitted (currently 15% increase year-over-year), and number of Seattle faculty who are supported by ONR&I services. Currently, 40 of our 45-tenure line and research faculty (89%) serve as investigators on extramural grants that we help support. Additionally, the office supports nine research and training grants led by PhD students (e.g., NIH F31 grants, foundation grants). As these metrics demonstrate, we are meeting or exceeding reasonable expectations. Yet, the management of these grants is not simply transactional- every single research project has monthly financial reports to be calculated and shared; modifications that must be created, processed and diligently tracked; and growing compliance and cross-institutional coordination that require extensive familiarity, expertise, curiosity, communication, tracking and independence across dozens of faculty and staff. The UW School of Nursing is incredibly lucky to have more than 100 years of collective grant management experience across our grant support team, who often seamlessly orchestrate this detail-oriented and nuanced work behind the scenes.
Finally, in what can be the hardest to measure, equity is perhaps the raison d’être for a localized grant management team. Every grant, and every investigative team, are vastly different. They have different terms, structures, needs, and varying levels of experience. There is no assembly-line approach to responsible grant management in an organization as productive and diverse as ours. While a seasoned investigator who has decades of NIH grant experience may not require proportionally more staff time to carry out a simple R01; another equally seasoned investigator with multiple subcontracts and dynamic reporting requirements across continents may need exponentially more support. Within this context, we strive to provide tailored, professional, accurate and equitable support so that each of our scientists can dedicate themselves wholly to the science, and not the business complexities of their grants.
Unique within the School of Nursing, the Office for Nursing Research & Innovation budget is funded by both federal (55%) and WA state funds. These are taxes paid by hard-working men and women who, through legislative processes, entrust us to do work that promotes the public good. We are committed to upholding the highest standards as stewards of these funds. We also hold an intrinsic belief that stewardship is best measured by both quantitative and qualitative metrics that illustrate the full impact of the UW School of Nursing’s research. To that end, we will continue to highlight the impact of the research we support on the public who underwrite our work. We encourage you to read each week’s Notes on Nursing Research and Innovation to fully understand the remarkable breadth and depth of this work and hope that you will engage with us to disseminate this impact across all sectors of our community.