Elms Doctor of Nursing Practice Students Celebrate Milestone
CHICOPEE — Elms College School of Nursing held a white coat ceremony on Dec. 16 to honor the college’s inaugural class of DNP (doctor of nursing practice) students as they move from the classroom into clinical practice training. The 39 students, who started in fall 2014, will begin their clinical training in January.
The DNP degree is a clinical practice doctorate in an advanced specialty of nursing practice. DNP graduates from Elms are eligible to sit for advanced certification and licensure in one of two specialty tracks: family nurse practitioner or adult-gerontology acute-care nurse practitioner.
“Students in our inaugural class are accomplished and experienced registered nurses with many years of experience in primary care, encompassing pediatrics to geriatrics, acute care, and intensive care across the lifespan,” said Jean Pelski, director of advanced clinical practice for the DNP program at Elms. “They have earned this rite of passage, and we are recognizing them with the white coat.”
Added Teresa Kuta Reske, director of program operations for the DNP program, “this ceremony is a formal acknowledgement that our DNP students are moving into the clinical practice arena and into their advanced nursing specialty courses.” She presented the DNP students with ‘Humanism in Medicine’ pins — gifts from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which initiated the first white-coat ceremony in 1993.
“Our mission at Elms College and our School of Nursing is to provide quality academic programs that meet the needs of our community,” said Kathleen Scoble, dean of the School of Nursing. “We have looked and listened very hard over the years to see where the community’s healthcare workforce needs are, and we’ve evolved our nursing program to meet those needs — all the while, first and foremost, committed to graduating nurses who are well-prepared and qualified for the roles in which they will practice.”
Most local programs are educating advanced-practice nurses at the master’s level, but Elms College educates them at the doctorate level. The college has partnered with local hospital systems — Baystate Medical System and Berkshire Health Systems — to fund cohorts of nurses from those institutions to fill critical roles now and in the future, but Scoble noted that the partnership is not limited to funding.
“Our partners from Baystate and Berkshire Medical Center have given input into our curriculum. They have worked with us in course development as context experts, they have taught our students already as expert lecturers, they’ve assisted us in identifying clinical training sites and faculty, and they have joined us as members of our new DNP advisory council, which we launched a few months ago,” she said.