Nursing

Chief Nursing Officer

Jackie Somerville, RN, PhD is chief nursing officer and senior vice president of Patient Care Services at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a position she assumed January, 2011. 

Throughout her career in nursing, one guiding principle has shaped the care she provided, the research she has conducted and the decisions she makes as a leader: that the patient must feel known as a whole person by the nurse.  Somerville believes that the nurse-patient relationship, which she has researched extensively, truly provides the foundation for healing.

Somerville joined BWH from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she served as associate chief nurse of the MGH Cancer Center, Surgical Services, Orthopedics and Neuroscience Nursing since 2001. She was part of a team that created a patient and family advisory board to ensure that patients and their families had an opportunity to provide feedback about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. As an associate nurse scientist at MGH, she and her colleagues developed an instrument to measure patient care associate work environment satisfaction.

Prior to joining MGH, Somerville served at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as interim vice president of Patient Care Services and, before that, as director of Perioperative Nursing. She also has held leadership roles at New England Medical Center, first as a nurse manager and then as a vice chair of Surgical Nursing and interim co-chair of the Department of Nursing.

A long-time Boston area resident, Somerville completed her bachelor’s and PhD in Nursing at Boston College and her master’s in Nursing Administration at Boston University.

Philosophy on Nursing Education

The vision for the Department of Nursing is excellent care to patients and families, with the best staff, in the safest environment. This vision is grounded in nursing research that demonstrates a relationship among formal educational preparation of nurses, characteristics of the care environment and patient outcomes. Evidence suggests that better patient outcomes result when a higher proportion of baccalaureate-prepared registered nurses provide care in hospitals (Aiken, Clarke, Cheung, Sloane and Silber, 2003; Estabrooks, Midodzi, Cummings, Ricker, Giovannetti, 2005). Increasingly complex patient care needs, clinical therapeutics and teamwork require sophisticated nursing judgment. Baccalaureate preparation in nursing, appropriate clinical expertise and adequate staffing resources are all critical to support patient care.