Elms College to Host White-coat Ceremony for DNP Students
CHICOPEE — The Elms College School of Nursing will host a white-coat ceremony on Thursday, Dec. 8 at 6 p.m. to honor the college’s second class of DNP (doctor of nursing practice) students as they move from the classroom into clinical practice training. The students, who started in the fall of 2015, will begin their clinical training in January. The ceremony will be held in Veritas Auditorium in Berchmans Hall.
“This ceremony formally acknowledges that our DNP students are moving on to the clinical practice arena, and into their advanced nursing specialty courses,” said Teresa Kuta Reske, director of program operations for the DNP program at Elms College.
Added Jean Pelski, director of Advanced Clinical Practice for the DNP program at Elms, “the white-coat ceremony is a traditional rite of passage for medical students as they transition into their residency. Now that nurse practitioners are having parity with those professions, we’re adopting the same tradition.”
The DNP degree is a clinical practice doctorate in an advanced specialty of nursing practice. DNP graduates will be eligible to sit for advanced certification and licensure in one of two specialty tracks: family nurse practitioner or adult-gerontology acute-care nurse practitioner.
“The Elms College DNP program addresses the growing need for advanced-practice nurses in adult and family care as the population ages and the demand for primary care continues to grow,” said Kathleen Scoble, dean of the School of Nursing. “This helps us to fulfill our mission and vision to serve our community by educating professional nurses.”
Most local programs are educating advanced practice nurses at the master’s level, but Elms College educates them at the doctorate level, Reske pointed out. The college has partnered with local hospital systems — Baystate Health and Berkshire Health Systems — to fund cohorts of nurses from those institutions to fill critical roles now and into the future. “This is a significant collaboration, representing an important investment in the health of our communities by these health systems,” Scoble said.
The DNP white coat ceremony will include opening remarks from the dean of the School of Nursing, as well as readings, speeches, a pledge/oath, a blessing of the coats, and the presentation of the coats to the students. The keynote speaker for the ceremony will be Dr. Michael Bailin, chair of the Anesthesiology Department at Baystate Medical Center. Bailen, a member of the Elms DNP faculty, serves on the program’s advisory council.