Clin-STAR Journey Story

Addressing Health Disparities in Nursing Home and Long-Term Care

Dr. Jasmine L. Travers, PhD, RN, MHS, is an Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner and an Assistant Professor at Rory Meyers College of Nursing, New York University.

While pursuing her PhD at the Columbia University School of Nursing, she considered various academic trajectories, initially thinking teaching was the direction for her. However, once she became involved in the field of health disparities, she decided that her career needed to be research-focused and that her work could be used to help patients in real time and in real practice.

One of her primary interests is identifying and reducing disparities in access to quality long-term care for older adults in various settings, including home, community, assisted living, and nursing home environments. Per Dr. Travers, “As we look to place a focus on equity, we must also recognize there are gaps in what we know about drawing on equity principles. How do we go about building equity-focused research and mentoring within an equity lens at the core?” Dr. Travers believes that early-career faculty need to be more intentional about their work and that maintaining a focus on equity will best equip them to create teams and study designs that are inclusive, as well as to be able to recruit participants in an equitable way.

When Dr. Travers first entered her PhD program in 2013, she focused on the 18- to 64-year-old age group, trying to understand access to care and how to get marginalized people to sign up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Later in her program, she switched her focus to older adults when she saw how much work needed to be done. A new advisor had a great deal of nursing home data, and Dr. Travers built on her new realized niche doing her post-doctoral fellowship on expanding access to nursing home and long-term care and investigating how access to care differed based on race and other socioeconomic factors and workforce issues.

Hand-in-hand with Dr. Travers’s interest in equity is her interest in health policy. During her second postdoctoral fellowship with the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program and under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Gill, she spent a summer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to acquire expertise in health policy research and practice, focusing on policies and funding of nursing-home care. She additionally worked with a community organization that had patient navigators, who served as liaisons for individuals in the community needing long-term care services. This experience showed her that communicating with policymakers and engaging with the community could intersect on a practical level for patients.

Dr. Travers enjoys the variety of opportunities in the older adult arena. She sat on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee to improve quality of care in nursing homes; a significant portion of the committee’s report was on the work she had done specifically on disparities in nursing homes. As a Beeson Scholar, another one of her projects is identifying factors that are driving unnecessary and disproportionate nursing home placement among Black and Latino older adults. She wonders, “Is nursing home placement avoidable? If we can identify the root cause(s), we can reduce or prevent nursing home placements in these populations.” She is also working with the American Association of Retired Persons as an advisor to develop a Score Card that addresses equity in access to and quality of long-term services and supports.

Dr. Travers has participated in an AGS/Clin-STAR symposium and Clin-STAR Office Hours, and she has benefitted from the Clin-Star webinars, which she indicated are informative and responsive to the needs of clinician investigators, especially early career faculty, in developing and navigating a career path. She has additionally benefited tremendously from being a part of the Beeson Scholars family through access to esteemed mentors and colleagues, training, and resources. She says, “I’m very grateful for the mentorship and collaboration that I have received thus far and for the team I’ve been able to build. Being able to implement programs and strategies that are equitable and that change care for individuals is very rewarding.”