Teaching

Dr. Ersek develops and disseminates best practices to improve palliative and end-of-life care for people living in nursing homes and, more recently, for veterans. With NIH funding, she developed a palliative care curriculum for nurses and nursing assistants in nursing homes that was the foundation for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s End-of-Life Nursing Education (ELNEC) Consortium – Geriatric curriculum. ELNEC – Geriatric has been disseminated across the United States, and in Europe, Japan, and Korea.

Research

Currently, Dr. Ersek is co-principal investigator of a five-year VA-funded program entitled, Preferences Elicited and Respected for Seriously Ill Veterans through Enhanced Decision-Making (PERSIVED). Its overall goal is to prevent unwanted, burdensome treatments by eliciting preferences for care from Veterans who are served by the Veterans Health Administration’s Home-Based Primary Care teams and the Community Nursing Home Program. She also serves as co-investigator on several NIH- and VA-funded studies with interdisciplinary colleagues at Penn and around the United States.

Clinical Practice

Dr. Ersek is senior scientist at the Veteran Experience Center, a national VA quality improvement program, which administers surveys to bereaved family members who are asked to rate the care received by veterans in the last month of life. The team disseminates survey results to guide quality improvement efforts in VA medical centers across the country. Through secondary analyses, the team also informs clinical care and performance measurement in VA and non-VA settings, and presents these analyses at national meetings and publishes them in peer-reviewed journal articles.