Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
dmiceli@rutgers.edu, (848) 932-5861
Dr. Gray-Miceli’s interest in aging began as a teenager when she volunteered at a nearby nursing home. These first hand experiences later led to her professional practice career as a nationally certified Gerontological Nurse Practitioner and to shape her subsequent teaching and clinical research initiatives targeted to improve the quality and safety for vulnerable frail elders residing in long term care. For over 3 decades, Dr. Gray-Miceli has collaborated with inter-professional colleagues from geriatric medicine, social work, psychology, sociology and most recently, bio-engineers to create and test innovative educational solutions for practice change for care of frail elders and technological solutions for falls prevention.
Dr. Gray-Miceli’s scholarship centers on research in falls prevention within nursing homes, older adult’s perceptions of falls (qualitative dissertation research of lived experiences of a serious fall), clinical care of frail elders, and enhancing geriatric nursing education. Dr. Gray-Miceli’s innovation includes the development and testing of a practice based process of care measure for use by RNs with older patients who fall in nursing homes. As a John A Hartford Post-Doctoral Scholar (2002-2004), Dr. Gray-Miceli, along with colleagues have developed and tested a 30 item post fall assessment tool, called the Post Fall Index, shown effective in reducing falls by 30%. Dr. Gray-Miceli has extensive expertise examining fall related consequences among older adults in long term care facilities (e.g, predictors of head injury and orthostatic hypotension among elderly fallers) and staff nurse’s requisite knowledge of falls which ultimately impact on the health, safety and quality of care in the aftermath of a fall. Dr. Gray-Miceli has also led large scale educational interventions in acute-care hospitals, in state government, to reduce falls by creating novel nurse-driven educational solutions shown to significantly impact fall outcomes.
As a consummate educator, Dr. Gray-Miceli has developed a sound pedagogical approach to teaching clinical care of older adults along with resources to help faculty teach geriatric nursing care , e.g., evidenced-based white papers, case studies and lecture content, espoused in the Geriatric Nursing Education Consortium (GNEC) curriculum. GNEC has been used to educate more than 808 faculty from over 418 Baccalaureate nursing programs in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Dr. Gray-Miceli’s clinical work in falls prevention has been featured since 2008 on AHRQ’s National Clearing House, Clinical Practice Guidelines web page. She is the author of : 5 Easy Steps to Prevent Falls: The comprehensive guide to keeping patients of all ages safe, American Nurses Association, publication. As a scholar clinician, Dr. Gray-Miceli is dedicated to teaching excellence in care of older adults, creation of evidenced-based solutions for falls prevention, including technological approaches to manage symptomatic falls and collaboration for policy change for older adults.
