Sandra Staveski

Sandy Staveski PhD, RN, CPNP-AC, FAAN is an assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco, School of Nursing. She has over 25 years of clinical and teaching experience in cardiac critical care. Dr. Staveski’s research is aimed at improving outcomes of children after cardiac surgery through preventing harm they may experience during hospitalization and at home. She has focused on facilitating safe transition from hospital to home care for post-operative pediatric cardiac patients in low- and middle-income countries. Specially, she examined the effect of implementing a structured nurse-parent discharge education program in Southern India. The Parent Education Discharge Instruction (PEDI) program was developed to educate nurses on the importance of discharge teaching and to provide them with a structured process for conducting parent teaching for home care of children after cardiac surgery. The PEDI program has been implemented in 10 hospitals and in 5 countries, reaches over 10,000 children and their families annually, and is available open access through the Children’s HeartLink website. Current CICU research activities include exploring methods for reducing the iatrogenic effects of analgesics and sedatives through PC4’s comfort group and exploring CICU circadian rhythm disturbance and delirium. Dr. Staveski is the immediate Past President of the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society.