Sheila Molony, PhD, RN, BC

On leave until July, 2009*

• Assistant Professor
• Adult, Family, Gerontological, and Women's Health Primary Care Specialty

Yale School of Nursing - Rm. 231
100 Church Street South
P. O. Box 9740
New Haven, CT 06536
USA

sheila.molony@yale.edu

203.737.5354
203.785.6455 fax

*On Leave

Dr. Molony was awarded the Claire M. Fagin Fellowship from the John A. Hartford Foundation and is presently on leave from her faculty position to which she will return on July 1, 2009.

About

Yale School of Nursing has a history of innovation, leadership and excellence, and nowhere is there a greater need for these qualities than in gerontological nursing. It is my goal to make a substantive contribution to a future in which YSN is a center of gerontological nursing leadership. Older adults require compassionate, skillful, informed nursing practice.

Gerontological nursing demands an interdisciplinary approach, collaboration and teamwork. The clinicians, scientists and other scholars at the Yale School of Nursing, Yale School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Yale School of Medicine, and the Claude Pepper Center contribute to a fertile environment for geriatric scholarship.

The focus of my scholarship is to improve the experience of older persons struggling to maintain quality of life and sense of self in the context of changing health and changing environments. My specific expertise is in the area of person-environment relationship as a mediator of health and quality of life outcomes. I am researching the meaning of home as a construct of importance to person-environment relationship, and I am taking steps to advance a program of research to create and test individualized, interdisciplinary interventions to foster at-homeness in residential long-term care, building on preliminary studies. As a Claire M. Fagin Post-Doctoral Fellow, I will be collaborating with the scholars at the Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence at the University of Pennsylvania to further develop my expertise in this important area.

As a Gerontological Nurse Practitioner, I have provided advanced nursing care in homes for the aged, long-term care (LTC) facilities, wellness centers and community-based settings. In each of these settings, I have learned from the experiences of older adults and their caregivers. I have observed the positive impact of care and concern on the lives of facility residents, as well as the pain of witnessing unmet needs, understaffed units and uncritical acceptance of the status quo. The faces and voices of those residents, and others I have cared for over the years, stay with me. They remind me of the importance of this work, and motivate my engagement in this scholarly journey.

Research Interests

Quality of Living in Residential Long-Term Care Environments; The Meaning of Home to Older Adults; Development and Testing of An Instrument to Measure At-Home-Ness; The Experience of Living in a Nursing Home

Clinical Practice

Connecticut Community Care, Inc.

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