Message from Dean

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

Through innovation and creativity, nurse scientists have a real opportunity to improve patient care and outcomes.

No other discipline is at the patient’s bedside 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is nurses that deliver interventions and treatments, collaborating across the healthcare team, to care for the patient. However, much of the evidence needed for today’s evidence-based practice is still emerging. That’s why it is important to ask, “Is there a better way to do something?” and to question the status quo to make scientific discoveries, disprove theories and validate practices.

In my decades of research, I have learned that it is often the little things that make the biggest difference, such as mouth care in preventing pneumonia in ventilated patients, and the turning and positioning of critically ill patients to prevent complications.

To continue to foster innovation, we need to look at things differently and collaborate across disciplines through team science. At the College of Nursing, for example, Endowed Chair and computer scientist Dr. Gregory Welch is working with acute care nurse practitioner and Assistant Professor Dr. Frank Guido-Sanz on wound simulations to improve trauma care (see p. 10). While our aging expert Dr. Ladda Thiamwong has collaborated with kinesiology and engineering to use sensors to assess fall risk and prevent this leading cause of injury in older adults.

For nursing to survive as a discipline, we need more scientists. In the U.S., the statistics are staggering. A projected one-third of nursing faculty are expected to retire by 2025, while there has been an eight-year decline in PhD program enrollment. We need to mentor the next generation of nurse scientists. That’s why we are fostering a younger generation who can spend more time in a research career with our BSN to PhD program (see p. 20), and actively secure research funding, fellowships and scholarship opportunities to support doctoral students.

As a profession, and community of Knight nurses, we need to stay curious – to continue to ask questions, and find the answers. The health of our community and future of nursing depends on it.

Follow @MaryLouSoleUCF

MARY LOU SOLE

PhD, RN, CCNS, CNL, FAAN, FCCM Dean, UCF College of Nursing Orlando Health Endowed Chair in Nursing UCF Pegasus Professor, UCF’s Highest Faculty Honor