To all our Colleagues in McGill’s ISoN,
This week, we marked both National Nursing Week and International Nurses Day, the latter held on Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday. To commemorate this milestone, the World Health Organization named 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. And, 2020 is the Centennial of McGill’s Ingram School of Nursing, celebrating 100 years of educating outstanding nurses and conducting essential research to serve our communities.
It’s a remarkable convergence of events at a time when the role of Nursing and the sacrifices you are making are more profound than ever.
A century after the School’s founding, we are living through a pandemic, much the same as when McGill’s first Nursing course began. This is not what we expected the ISoN’s Centennial celebrations would look like. I’m acutely aware of the challenges you and many are facing in our clinical environments, including in the province’s CHSLDs. McGill Nursing has made exceptional and transformative contributions throughout its history. You have been at the forefront, leading change from 1920 through to today. Strengths-Based Nursing, the internationally recognized relational-care approach pioneered here, at the Ingram School of Nursing, is more important now than ever.
My hope is that one of the many learnings we take away from the COVID-19 pandemic is the invaluable place the Nursing profession and its research occupies in our health care system, and in our renamed Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
As we come to the end of National Nursing Week, I humbly thank you.
And as we continue to work through this unprecedented crisis, I ask that you please also take care of yourselves, as you care for others, and train the next generation to do the same.
Vice-Principal (Health Affairs)
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Le 15 mai 2020