Meet Michelle Chui: Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor

A fun fact about me is that I have four kids. They’re all grown and are living across the country now, so I spend a lot of frequent-flyer miles going out to visit them or paying for flights for them to come visit me.

Can you tell us a little more about your professional journey and how you ended up here at the School of Nursing after being at the School of Pharmacy for 17 years?

When I started my journey in undergrad, I wanted to be a pharmacist and went to pharmacy school. Around me were so many students dedicated to patient care and driven to help patients. And I realized that was not really what I wanted to do. What I really wanted to do was change health care.

After pharmacy school, I went on and got my PhD at Purdue University, where I focused on medication safety, the use of technology, and how to support both pharmacists and patients.

That started my journey of understanding, studying, and trying to improve medication safety in a School of Pharmacy. I was fortunate to be accepted to a position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison because the school is amazing and prestigious. I grew my career here, starting as a junior faculty member and making my way up to be a full professor.

As time went on, I realized that it wasn’t really about my career anymore. It was about supporting the careers of others.

That’s where my journey led me to the School of Nursing. The School of Nursing was looking for a faculty member to initiate, support, and develop mentoring programs for nursing students and their nursing faculty.

It was an opportunity to bring my research over, expand my role, and expand my thinking around how we can improve medication safety from the perspective of nurses, who primarily administer medication in hospitals. I could also expand my career to support and mentor new young people, and they, in turn, could improve health care.

What is the problem you are trying to address, who is involved, and what have you learned?

The problem that I’m trying to address is medication errors in the United States, a public health epidemic. For every $1 spent on prescription medication, $7 is spent addressing the problems associated with those medications. They could be side effects. They could be errors. They could be hospitalizations.

Imagine an older adult living on their own. Many older adults are now living on their own. The era in which older adults lived with their adult children has dissipated.

Think about the quick discharge rate of hospitalizations, as well. Patients are getting discharged faster. Older adults or patients with chronic illness could take as many as eight, ten, or twelve medications a day.

What ends up happening is that if an older adult wakes up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, gets dizzy and falls, that can lead very easily to a hip fracture, which lands them in the nursing home.

My goal in my career is to keep as many older adults out of the nursing home and in their home for as long as they can.

What difference could your work make in health care?

One of the approaches I take with my research is that I partner with human factors engineers.

Human factors engineers think about the entire system in which medications are being used: pharmacists when they’re dispensing medications; physicians when they’re prescribing medications; nurses when they’re administering medications; patients in their own home.

The good thing about human factors engineering is that they focus on the whole system.

My premise is that all these individuals are smart and well-meaning. They’re not lazy. They’re not cutting corners. They’re doing the best they can in a difficult situation.

The system is really what needs to be addressed. The human factors engineering approach addresses that system.

Why do you want to work with graduate student nurses?

Graduate students are the future of our career. They’re the future of health care. And they are on the front lines of taking care of patients.

They are the ones doing all this problem-solving. They’re the ones who are seeing problems before they even materialize.

They’re using their “Spidey sense” to try to really address these patient issues, advocate for patients, and ensure that medications are being taken correctly.

Because their system is quite complex, my research can help support them and help them do the job that they want to do.

From your experience, what impact does mentorship make on research and on the community at large?

This is a challenging career to embark on for any young person. There are many power dynamics in an academic environment.

Mentoring, on the other hand, is very effortful. There’s a lot of time that’s associated with it — a lot of meetings, a lot of reading people’s documents, etc.

For the most part, it’s quite altruistic.

Which is why I am just so privileged that Dean Scott hired me as part of the School of Nursing’s Excellence in Mentoring position.This is a dedicated faculty position to build the mentorship culture here at the School of Nursing.

Dean Scott had this idea of creating an ecosystem of mentoring across the School of Nursing. She wanted structure and systems to increase the level of mentorship and increase the level of reward associated with mentorship.

We all have different mentors for different things. Some may be a mentor for the scientific discipline that you’re pursuing. Some may be a work-life mentor. There might be mentoring for other things as we navigate these systems and try to be the best that we can.

That’s what I’ve been doing over the last year. I’m really trying to understand what structures are in place and where there is ability and passion from other people to partner with, so that we can do it together. This is really a team effort

What do you enjoy most about your work and the community at the School of Nursing?

The culture and climate of the School of Nursing is really important to me. I want to work with individuals who care about the things that I care about and who are striving for and struggling with the same things that I struggle with. All in an environment where we can celebrate our successes together and encourage each other when we have hard times, because there are going to be hard times as well.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much attention is paid to well-being, supporting each other, and doing fun things. In the School of Nursing, it’s not just about work. It’s about fun. Because fun is what supports the work we’re doing.

I’ve been meeting with junior faculty, associate faculty, and full-level faculty, and they all talk about the same thing: how to support students, how to support each other, how to have difficult conversations when we need to have those difficult conversations, and how to have fun together.

How does your role contribute to the Wisconsin Idea?

The Wisconsin Idea is part of the DNA of the University of Wisconsin. It’s the idea that the good work that comes out of the university not only supports faculty and the University of Wisconsin but also impacts citizens of the state of Wisconsin and beyond.

I’m indebted to the taxpayers of Wisconsin to ensure that the work that I do indeed supports their lives — directly or indirectly.

I’ve partnered with many of the health systems here in Wisconsin. The focus of the work has been to address issues such as the opioid crisis and to help health systems develop opioid stewardship programs.

That model was used in other rural health systems across the state. That is an opportunity for me to think about building structure and process that could be used to support the opioid crisis across Wisconsin.

On the education side, we are training individuals who we hope will stay in Wisconsin and support the health care needs of the state.

What career experiences give you a sense of hope and purpose?

I love mentoring graduate students, and I’ve just been so fortunate with the graduate students that I’ve worked with. They’re hardworking, passionate, fun, and creative.

I’m at the point where I have numerous graduate students who have graduated, and they are now faculty at Research 1 institutions doing good work and, frankly, surpassing my successes as well.

That just makes me so thrilled to see how successful they are and how they are paving the way.

I decided that my calling was not taking care of patients one-on-one; it was changing processes and changing systems. And through the graduate students that I have mentored and supported, they are now changing the health care system for the better.