Recipients of ONS Foundation Funding

Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Eun-Ok Im was greatly affected by an early experience in oncology in her native Korea. She was caring for a terminally ill cancer patient, a man, who complained of great pain. He asked to be moved to a single room, and his wife pleaded with the staff to accommodate his request. After being moved to the single room, the patient committed suicide. She learned two lessons from this experience -first, in the Korean culture men do not tend to complain, so the nurse must pay attention to a man's complaints, specifically. And second, it seemed so very sad to her that this man was forced to end his life to have freedom from pain. She resolved to do a better job of symptom management.

Dr. Im completed her bachelor's degree in nursing and her master's in public health in Korea. After coming to the United States, she completed her MSN and her PhD in nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, and postdoctoral study at University of California at San Francisco in Women's Health and Theory Development. From her early experience as a staff nurse in Korea, she was interested in how cancer patients change as they go through their cancer experience, and she became interested in pain specifically. She notes that in Korea it was not uncommon to use placebos in the treatment of pain, and she questioned that practice.

She became interested in the pain experience during her postdoctoral study working on an interdisciplinary project with a Korean professor aimed at systematic management of cancer pain. At the same time, she was working on another project with her mentor, Dr. Afaf Meleis, on gender and ethnic differences in anginal pain. Gender issues particularly intrigued her. Applying a feminist perspective which she had used in her dissertation work, she began to examine gender and ethnic issues in regard to pain.

Her ONS Foundation funding began with small grant funding for three projects, one of which she was Principal Investigator, that related to a systematic approach to cancer pain using a decision support validating an adaptive fuzzy computer software. At the same time, she was co-investigator on two studies involving breast cancer patients examining their beliefs and screening practices. Subsequently she received the ONS Foundation/Genentech, Inc. Outcomes Research grant to develop a decision support computer program for cancer pain. Dr. Im states that, "Without the research grants from the ONS Foundation, I could not have developed my career as a researcher." She goes on to describe how her research trajectory was built, one study at a time through which she gained research skills and knowledge in oncology nursing. Her work began with smaller studies focused on developing the computer program based on data from international and U.S. nurses which has been refined through larger funding from the ONS Foundation. She is currently conducting a 5-year RO1 study funded by NINR as the PI (2003-2008), which is based on her earlier study on cancer pain management supported by the ONS Foundation. This RO1 study is also aimed at development of a decision support system for cancer pain management based on actual data from cancer patients. She has another RO1 application in development that will further build on her previous work.

She identifies recruitment as the most challenging experience in research. She mentions that in a current Internet study, she has had a difficult time recruiting the African American subjects needed despite trying many of the methods suggested in the literature. "That is one reason why it is important to choose a research topic that you feel passionate about because research has good points, but also downsides (like the recruitment issues), and you need passion to keep you committed to the task, to complete the study and disseminate the results." She urges new researchers not to be disappointed with negative funding decisions. She encourages thinking about the fact that those efforts will never be a loss, but rather serve as the concrete ground for the next project.

Besides being passionate about one's research topic, Dr. Im has this advice for new researchers - try not to become involved with too many projects, especially when they are on very diverse topics, as this can keep you from focusing on the topic you are really passionate about.

Her long term goal is to help nurses provide appropriate and adequate care for all cancer patients in pain and to develop an ultimate decision support system for cancer pain management that includes diverse sub-systems for each different type of cancer that will consider gender and ethnic differences. This will assist the nurse at the bedside through the use of a hand held decision support system to deliver individualized pain management to oncology patients.