Emory Magazine | In Brief: Quote, Unquote

MEDICAL education is not free from the forces of managed care, rising costs, and changing public policy currently rocking the health-care profession. Such complex dynamics prompted Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to develop a doctoral program that will admit its first class in the fall of 1999.

According to MARGARET PARSONS ’75MN-’85PhD, interim nursing school dean, growing challenges in the health sciences are changing the nature of nursing education. "Most doctoral programs [in nursing] were designed in the 1970s, when health care was much less turbulent and transitional than it is today," Parsons says, noting that nursing education has become more analytical, with the emphasis shifting from how things are done to why. "We have a different view now of what’s needed in a nursing doctoral program—one that addresses today’s issues in a time of unprecedented upheaval."

For example, Parsons cites thorny ethical issues—such as who gets what care and how technology can be used sensitively and compassionately—as areas in which nurses are contributing research and insight. The doctoral program’s core curriculum will focus on outcomes measurement, ethical decision-making, and policy issues and will draw on the nursing school’s research strengths in women’s health, cardiovascular disease, oncology, pain, and sleep.

Housed in the graduate school, the Ph.D. program will offer interdisciplinary study, incorporating course work in areas such as the biosciences and public health. "There’s no other school in the area whose curriculum is comparable to the new nursing school degree," says graduate school dean Donald Stein. "We’ll have plenty of opportunity to train people who’d have to go quite far to find a similar program."

Emory’s program joins sixty-four other doctoral programs across the nation, including three in Georgia. Six to eight students are expected to begin work on the new degree this fall.—A.O.A.