Speakers encouraged the School of Nursing graduating class to be empathetic towards patients while supporting their colleagues and the healthcare systems they serve at the school’s celebration in Lisner Auditorium Friday.
School of Nursing officials and faculty celebrated 393 undergraduate, graduate, certificate, and doctoral students, recognizing their graduation and presenting a dozen awards at the ceremony. Speakers said graduates have the honor and responsibility to save patients’ lives and reform healthcare systems that sometimes provide deficient and inequitable treatments.
Christian Lanphere, the graduate speaker and a doctor of nursing practice graduate, told students the intimate interactions they will experience with patients and families in the nursing field will position them to be informed advocates for problems in healthcare, like rising costs of treatment. He said as nursing continues to be known as the most trusted profession, graduates must remember they are “uniquely positioned” to connect with patients on a medical and personal level.
“As a nurse practitioner, I have witnessed how advanced knowledge enables us to diagnose, treat and heal, but let’s not forget that we are nurses first,” Lanphere said. “Our nursing foundation teaches us to listen, connect and care beyond the patient’s chart in ways that can’t be measured.”
Lanphere said nurses should expect to step into a healthcare system full of staffing shorting, more severe illnesses and financial pressures, but also that they, as nurses, are the force that can bring about change. He told graduates they should seek to embody figures like Florence Nightingale, a 19th century nurse who revolutionized hospital hygiene practices after seeing how unsanitary environments harmed patients.
“Our role is not just to participate in healthcare, but to redesign, and that is where the excitement lies,” Lanphere said. “We are not part of the static profession. We are entering a system that is evolving, expanding and demanding leadership.”
Susan Kelly-Weeder, the school’s dean, reminded graduates that patients’ trust in nurses is “sacred” and they have the responsibility to care for patients at their most vulnerable moments. She told graduates to remain empathetic and determined to make a positive impact on patients’ lives.
“It is a privilege to share in these deeply personal experiences, and it is truly where the art and science of nursing come together with the patient in the center,” Kelly-Weeder said.
Phoebe Dye, the ceremony’s undergraduate speaker and a bachelor’s of science in nursing graduate, said nursing is as equally full of life and hope as it is grief and hardship. Dye told graduates to look back on experiences from nursing school, such as showing up to clinical shifts exhausted or treating patients in stressful environments, to remind themselves of their resilience.
“The world may show you its harshest sides, but you still decide how you show up within it,” Dye said. “The world may be cruel, therefore we won’t be and maybe that’s what nursing really is — refusing to let the world make you less human.”
Dye said seeing astronauts from the Artemis II mission last month — who said in a news conference after their return that traveling a record distance away from Earth made them feel more connected to human beings — made her realize how nurses can also be in uncertain situations while feeling deeply connected to the patients they are caring for. She urged graduates to continue showing up as nurses, trusting that their choice to care for others is stronger than their self-doubt in their ability to treat patients.
“We didn’t have to go to the moon to walk into the unknown,” Dye said. “We found it right here in the quiet of a patient’s room and in the spaces between us, where people chose to care for one another.”
