Dean's Welcome
Welcome to the College of Nursing!
I am sure that you are excited to begin a new school year and I share your excitement. Last year, I moved here from Stockholm, Sweden where I was the head of the Department of Nursing at the Karolinska Institute. Along with my administrative commitment, I have also conducted research in the fields of Transcultural and Gerontological care. My most recent and still ongoing research is about improving the cultural competence of nurses in order to better care for our diverse populations. I am truly thrilled to work at a university that is so committed to educating outstanding nurse professionals who are also dedicated to the care of the vulnerable. I believe that together with the faculty and staff, I will do my best to prepare you to be nurses with competencies and skills that embrace the wide realities of healthcare in the world.
Nursing education, as informed by nursing research and integrated with nursing practice, needs to prepare students for careers in the new and ever changing global arena. We need to seek directions for further developing nursing science and education to learn about human caring with respect to people, families, institutions, communities, and culture. This is best met through a holistic approach, which includes methods from both the sciences and the arts. The nurse of today and tomorrow must be able to collaborate with providers from many disciplines. To achieve this, we must understand knowledge development. In planning for nursing education, there are several issues that should be addressed.
1. Access and diversity: Nursing education must be based on advanced pedagogical methods that make it meaningful for various types of students from across the globe without respect to national boundaries.
2. Clinical relevance: Continued collaboration with all clinical arenas allows us to maximize opportunities to translate research into practical applications thereby improving the quality of care.
3. Translation of theoretical knowledge and research findings to interventions and applications for practice: We must continue to develop an educational model that recognizes education, research, and practice as mutually inclusive and complementary.
4. Multidisciplinary collaboration: Inter- and multi-disciplinary collaboration needs to be developed and managed to expand benefits for nurse scientists/students and members of other disciplines.
5. Innovation and international competition: Nursing science has been slow in positioning its work in a global context instead tending to focus locally. Rather than replicating past work we need to move forward by producing new knowledge that needs to be positioned at the cutting edge of the urgent questions of tomorrow that are important for peoples’ healthcare.
Nursing science nurtures and develops large and essential professions and its contribution to any 21st century health care system must be recognized and acknowledged. Support of nursing science is an important shared responsibility of all of those agencies with a vested interest in the development of a high quality, cost-effective, and innovative contribution from nursing science to the overall healthcare system.
The goal of nursing education at Seattle University College of Nursing is to educate students with the understanding that nursing science has something important to offer different from and complementary to the biomedical sciences, that nurse professionals will need a multifaceted approach to solve the problems of the 21st century; and that people are more than consumers who present a singularly defined problem, there are diverse individuals with complex histories and experiences.
I look forward to working with you to build on the good work, reputation and strengths of our college and to help you realize your visions and goals. I would like to close with the words of Florence Nightingale, who stimulated the development of the profession of nursing and still draws both praise and criticism from generations of nurses.
What nursing ought to do
(From Notes of Nursing by Florence Nightingale, p. 6)
“I use the word nursing for want of better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicine and the application of Poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanness, quiet, and proper selection and administration of diet--all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.”
Azita Emami, PhD, RNT, RN
Dean and Professor