Teach & Serve / Student Spotlight
Mala Lama
RN · Doctor of Nursing Practice Student
Turning firsthand experience into better everyday care.
Adult-Gerontology Primary Care Track
Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Project underway
Where it started
Who asks whether the catheter is still needed?
Sometimes an important change in healthcare begins with one simple question.
Through her home care work, Mala helped care for an older adult who was living with a long-term urinary catheter. He couldn’t manage it on his own, and even with hours of daily caregiver support, the complications kept adding up: repeated infections, injuries, and a catheter that was pulled out.
Mala and the care team began asking a question no one else seemed to be asking: does he still need this catheter? They raised it with his primary care provider again and again until the catheter was reevaluated and removed.
Details of this story have been kept general to protect the patient’s privacy.
“One unasked question had cost him months of preventable suffering, and that is what this project is about: building the reassessment into primary care so that no patient has to wait for someone to ask.”
The project
Improving Catheter Stewardship in Primary Care
A doctoral quality improvement project that helps family medicine physicians make catheter reassessment part of routine visits for patients living in the community.
Brief lessons by text message
Short, evidence-based education that busy clinicians can complete on their own schedule.
A prompt in the health record
A point-of-care tool that helps clinicians ask, at the visit itself, whether a urinary catheter is still needed.
- October 2026Project launchedClinical education and implementation began at a community health center.
- NowProject underwayEducational activities, clinical implementation, and data collection.
- NextLearning and reflectionEvaluating the experience and identifying lessons for clinical practice.
What she’s learning
Lessons no classroom could teach.
- Plans meet reality quickly. When recruitment proved harder than expected, flexibility mattered more than a perfect design.
- Meet people where they are. Busy physicians engage with education on their own schedules.
- Implementation runs on relationships. Person-centered care, quality and safety, and partnership across professions: in Mala’s words, it took all three to change one man’s life, and it will take all three to change practice.
The larger question
What can change when someone closest to a problem decides to act?
Featured by Teach & Serve as an example of mentorship, applied learning, and clinical quality improvement.