Meet Baylor’s nationally recognized expert in mental health nursing

Dr. Karen Foli understands well the lives of the people her research impacts. As a longtime nurse and adoptive parent, Foli’s work sits at the intersection of mental health, nursing, and adoptive/kinship parents.

Foli came to Baylor last year from Purdue University to serve as the inaugural Louise Herrington Endowed Chair in Mental Health Nursing, a new position created to advance mental and behavioral health research in Baylor’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing. In Foli, the school found one of those subjects’ top researchers.

Research into mental health and nursing has long benefitted practitioners in these fields, but Foli broke new ground in bridging the two. She explains her research with a funnel analogy: Mental health is at the top of the funnel, with depression and psychological trauma following, then applying these topics specifically to nurses and adoptive families. Her groundbreaking research helps the helpers — providing insight and understanding of the challenges nurses face as they care for others, as well as insight for healthcare providers into related dynamics for adoptive/kinship families.

[HEAR Dr. Foli on a recent episode of Baylor Connections]

Most notably, Foli broke new ground by identifying a nurse-specific form of trauma that challenges many in the field: insufficient resource trauma. The identification and naming of this challenge called for new efforts at the healthcare organizational level to provide nurses with resources sufficient to meet the human needs they see daily around them. Her 2019 book, The Influence of Psychological Trauma in Nursing, broke new ground in the field and won two national book awards.

For Foli, it all comes back to people in the situations she herself experiences.

“I want to strengthen families,” she says. “For both nurses and parents, if you can help them take care of their wellbeing, they’ll be able to be better caregivers themselves.”

Sic ’em, Dr. Foli!