Recruiting 100,000 Nurses for Women’s Health Study
Women around the world have benefited from the findings of the Nurses’ Health Study since it began in 1976.
The study has significantly advanced knowledge about women’s health since it launched in the 1970s to examine the health risks of oral contraceptives—resulting in their reformulation. The study continues today to identify the consequences of nurses’ shift work and workplace exposures.
Decades of data from more than 230,000 nurses who regularly fill out detailed lifestyle questionnaires have been collected and analyzed in order to amass the evidence supporting much of what we understand today about the effects of lifestyle on health. It all happens in the Channing Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research division of BWH and Harvard Medical School.
The study makes headlines just about every week. “Nurses in the study take a lot of pride in the breakthroughs that have come out of their commitment and participation,” said Gary Chase, senior project manager.
Chase has been working for 24 years with two enormous cohorts that began mailing back questionnaires in 1976 (Nurses Health Study 1) and 1989 (Nurses Health Study 2). “BWH nurses can take special pride because it’s all happening where they work,” he said.
NHS3: The “next generation”
The Nurses Health Study is recruiting a new cohort—NHS3. Female registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and nursing students ages 20 to 46 from across the U.S. and Canada are eligible to participate. The study strives to recruit 100,000 nurses.
“It isn’t every day that you have an opportunity to participate in the longest running research study in the world related to women’s health,” Critical Care Nurse journal editor JoAnn Grif Alspach recently wrote. “Do it for yourself, your mother, daughters, granddaughters, great granddaughters, your female nurse colleagues, friends and neighbors. For all of the findings from the study that apply to both genders, do it for your spouse, your father, sons, grandsons, great grandsons, your male nurse colleagues, friends and neighbors.”
Interested participants can join on the NHS3 website, www.nhs3.org, and complete the study’s confidential surveys online. Participation is easy and convenient, and takes about one hour a year.
“Nurses Health Study is uniquely valuable because it has followed so many people for so long, and the data is very trustworthy because nurses have proven to be such dedicated, accurate responders,” Chase said.