Charlene Pope, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN

Charlene.Pope@va.gov

As a Senior Faculty Scholar, I serve as the Chief Nurse for Research at the Ralph J Johnson VA Medical Center, core coordinator For Implementation & Patient Care Research in the VA Health Equity and Rural Outreach Innovation Center (HEROIC)/COIN, and affiliate research professor at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Department of Pediatrics and Center for Health Disparities Research in Charleston, South Carolina. After 20 years of advanced nurse practice as a certified nurse midwife, I trained as a health service researcher and a sociolinguist who studies health disparities, variations in communication when patients and health providers speak with one another, and in an array of circumstances as a mixed methods and qualitative methodologist. Over the last decade, I have collaborated with multidisciplinary health and social science research teams studying communication across content areas (recording primary and specialty care visits and interviews concerning diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, trauma, adolescent vaccines, homeless Veterans, nursing shift handoffs and others) and participated in rural outreach. I also supervise an NIH/NLM-funded, Web-based, online qualitative data repository of recordings and transcriptions of interviews of people over 65 years of age of diverse race/ethnicities available internationally for research purposes (Carolinas Conversations Collection). These research areas and methods expertise offer the VAQS Fellows a variety of resources for mentoring and collaboration in the fields of communication and in health disparities as well as in the use of qualitative research methods.