Margo Brooks Carthon

Margo Brooks Carthon received her BSN from North Carolina A & T State University in 1995. She earned her MSN in Psychiatric and Adult Health from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and her Ph.D. in Nursing in 2008, from the University of Pennsylvania. Immediately after earning her Ph.D., she entered a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Penn in the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of History and the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, which she completed in June 2010. Brooks Carthon is a faculty member in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research. Margo’s scholarship is focused on the effects of nursing care organization on health outcomes and how systems can be redesigned to work more efficiently to improve patient care for patients from diverse ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her program of research is particularly concentrated on the care of our most vulnerable patient populations, especially those patients over the age of 65, with chronic health conditions, who are hospitalized for a medical-surgical reason. Margo is currently funded by the National Institute of Nursing/National Institutes of Health in a study which will examine how hospital care organization including nurse staffing and work environments and patient characteristics such as race and SES effect mortality and complications following routine surgical procedures. Margo is also a trained historian and has research interests in the history collaborative health initiatives used in minority communities to address illness disparities.