Ruth A. Anderson, RN,
PhD, FAAN
The scholarship of Ruth A. Anderson, RN, PhD, FAAN is dedicated to improving health care through management practices. Her contributions have been to combine nursing, management, and complexity science and apply these to theory development and research that have advanced better patient care and staff retention through management practices. Anderson's early work demonstrated that better staffing leads to better resident outcomes and lower turnover. Later she identified new ways to understand nursing management, demonstrating that interpersonal relationships are key. For example, she found that communication openness and relationship-oriented leadership lead to better quality; and that interaction between reward climate and communication openness leads to lower turnover. Her work identifies the management practices that clinical leaders can use to improve outcomes, suggesting new targets for practice and policy. Dr. Anderson is a tenured Professor in the School of Nursing. Her research has been funded by the NIH-National Institute of Nursing Research, Robert Wood Johnson, Department of Defense, and the American Nurses Foundation.
