URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

75 YEARS of NURSING

From the Founding of Our Nursing School to Service During a Global Pandemic

Barbara Wolfe Dean College of Nursing

written by CHRISTOPHER BARRETT ’08

When Paula Viau-Hann (‘69) attended the University of Rhode Island as a nursing student in the 1960s, an orange stood in for an arm for practice injections. Students in blue pinned striped dress uniforms, white shoes, and caps squeezed into a cramped lab. Each day an unlucky student was “volunteered” to lug a weighty pharmacy reference book to hospitals. Clinical research was reserved for medical schools. The 30 or so graduates a year expected to be employed in hospitals or visiting nursing associations. Seventy-five years after the founding of the College of Nursing, about 850 undergraduate students and 150 graduate students access a dedicated Nursing Education Center with labs stocked with interactive patient simulated manikins, sophisticated technology, and faculty steeped in leading research about patient care, nursing practice and policy. The college’s partnerships extend beyond nearby hospitals to encompass research projects around the world. Today, URI nursing education looks vastly different.

“The college and faculty always embraced being responsive to the changes in the health delivery system, to student clinical experiences and to what was happening on the national level,” said Viau-Hann, who went on to serve on the URI nursing faculty and retired in 2008 as associate dean of nursing emeritus. The college started the first nursing baccalaureate program in the state and conferred its first degree in 1947 during an era when hospitals hosted most nursing programs. Today, the nationally accredited URI program stands apart from hospitals — figuratively and literally. While maintaining a presence on the Kingston campus, the college in 2017 opened the Rhode Island Nursing Education Center in Providence, RI, in partnership with Rhode Island College and Brown University. The center puts students just minutes from some of the leading hospitals in the state and provides tens of thousands of square feet of lab and teaching space. “The center elevated the role of nursing and URI and provides a significant advantage for the students

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