Jackelyn Boyden

Jackelyn is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Philadelphia, PA). She has a Bachelor's degree in nursing, and dual Master's degrees in nursing and public health, as well as clinical backgrounds in acute care and community-based nursing.

Jackelyn's current work focuses on improving home-based palliative and hospice care for children with serious life-threatening illnesses and their families. Her dissertation project aims to develop and test a parent-reported measure to evaluate the outcomes of home-based pediatric palliative and hospice care. Using a MaxDiff approach with provider and parent participants, this project will rank-order and winnow a set of items, drawn from previously-developed parent-reported outcome measures, that will undergo further testing in later stages of the project. Creating a tool to evaluate care outcomes is critical for understanding how to improve the care provided to children with serious illnesses and their families living at home.