Leadership
CAN KNOWLEDGE REALLY CHANGE YOUR WORLD?
Coordinating two of the school’s nationally ranked nurse practitioner tracks are new program faculty Aimee Holland, DNP, WHNP-BC, NP-C, RN, RD (Women’s Health/Adult-Gerontology Primary Care), and D’Ann Somerall, DNP, MAEd, CRNP, FNPBC (Family NP). Together these NP faculty leaders have developed innovative teaching strategies, successfully engaging students and raising enrollment to unprecedented levels. Cultivating leadership would be impossible without a commitment to
advanced education and life-long learning. Nearly forty years ago, UAB established the first doctoral program in nursing in the Southeast. Today, UAB educates nurse leaders for a wide array of clinical settings through a highly successful Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program. “What’s driving our DNP forward, what has given it national recognition as a program of excellence, is our vision of staying pure to what the community really wants in a DNP graduate,” said Anne Alexandrov, a DNP
program faculty member. “An administrator in a clinical practice setting is looking for an expert clinical nurse who is capable of measuring phenomena in his or her environment, providing sophisticated analysis of that data, and drawing important conclusions about what needs to be done to improve practice. We want our graduates to show superior preparation in all of those areas so that their leadership will result in the best possible clinical situations and high levels of patient satisfaction.”
KNOWLEDGE: INSPIRING RESEARCH CAREERS Marie Bakitas, DNSc, APRN, NP-C, AOCN, ACHPN, FAAN, who joined UAB in 2012 and is the Marie L. O’Koren Endowed Chair and Professor, has an appointment in the UAB School of Medicine’s Comprehensive Center for Healthy Aging. She also is associate director of UAB’s internationally known Center for Palliative and Supportive Care. Bakitas said working with graduate students on their own research helps them understand the mission, scope and potential of palliative care. “I’ve been able to engage with students who might have thought, when they first came to nursing, that they wanted to be in the ICU or pediatrics,” Bakitas said. “But they come to understand that palliative care is exciting and cutting edge. It is nursing at its finest. You have the satisfaction and gratification of seeing that you really did make a difference.” Seth Landefeld and Marie Bakitas at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Wallace Tumor Institute 10 | UAB SCHOOL OF NURSING