The Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is a research and research training enterprise focusing on the outcomes of health care and health workforce policy. Established in 1989, the Center is a unique community within the School of Nursing drawing together faculty, students, and pre- and post-doctoral fellows from nursing, sociology, demography, medicine, management, economics, and other related disciplines. With collaborators from around the world, Center researchers study health system reorganization and policy changes and aim to produce research evidence to improve the quality of health care.

Our Program of Research

• Nursing workforce issues - the supply of nurses, nurse education, and scope of practice
• The impact of legislation and policy, hospital organization and staffing, and hospital economic, geographic and social context on patient outcomes like mortality, adverse events, and hospital readmissions and nurse outcomes like job satisfaction and burnout.
• The impact of policy, hospital organizational traits and context on racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health care outcomes
• The impact of changing hospital populations -namely patients with increasingly complex and chronic conditions-on the organization of nursing care and patient and nurse outcomes.

Our studies have always involved adult medical/surgical patients and over the years we have expanded our focus to include pediatric, neonatal, psychiatric, oncology, ICU, the elderly, the chronically ill and other specialty populations.