Head Nurse, Chief Cheerleader
| "This faculty has really thought about the issues: Who needs the education, and how do we get it to them?" Dean of Nursing Eileen Breslin, in the school's recently refurbished student resource center. (Ben Barnhart photo) |
The vivacious youngest member of the UMass Deans'
Council laughs heartily when reminded that—lustily as she now cheerleads
for the land-grant mission—she had to grow up and leave New England
to see the value of public higher education.
"It's true!" says the School of Nursing's Dean Eileen Breslin, who grew up in the small town of Hazardville, in Enfield, Connecticut. When, as a young nurse trained at Hartford Hospital, she was deciding where to go for a bachelor's degree, applying to UMass or UConn "never entered my mind," she says. "It just was not even on the radar screen."
To some extent, Breslin pleads youthful provincialism. "I'd never been north of Springfield!" she says. But what was really going on was the relatively low profile of public higher education in the Northeast.
Drawn, however, to the reputation of the nursing program at Northern Arizona University, Breslin catapulted herself not only out of her small-town Eastern orbit and into the great Southwest, but into public higher education as well. At Northern Arizona, where she studied, later taught, and was chair of the nursing department before she came to UMass; at the University of Arizona at Tucson, which at the time she was a graduate student had one of the nation's top-ten-ranked nursing programs; and finally at the University of Colorado, where she got her Ph.D., Breslin got a "first-class, world-class" education. Twenty years later, having come full circle geographically, she can hardly imagine working elsewhere than in public higher ed.
"That mission, that vision, is certainly what brought me here," says Breslin. "That and this faculty!"
Indeed, if the dean is a cheerleader for public education—and she was, incidentally, a member of the cheerleading squad at Enrico Fermi High—she's an even peppier one for the SON faculty. "The faculty are what made this seem such a remarkable opportunity," says Breslin, who was brought to UMass by Provost Cora Marrett in 1998. "Because they're innovators. The school has a tradition of firsts: the RN to BS program, the committment to Web-based learning, the partnership with the medical school in Worcester. This faculty has really thought about the issues, which are: Who needs the education, and how do we get it to them?"
The democratic mandate of a public university is especially important to Breslin after her two decades' experience in Arizona. Much of her work there involved delivery of health services to Indian reservations and other underserved communities. Like her fellow "nurse-scholars" at SON, she's maintained a committment to practice. "I've always kept my hand in," says Breslin. "In fact it's my dream to return to practice someday—to move to the Cape and hang out a shingle." As a member of the "very first generation" of nurse-practicioners, her earliest experience was establishing family planning services in rural Arizona. Later, as an academic, she continued to practice in rural settings during the summers. "My research on motivations for conceptraceptive use grew straight out of those experiences," says Breslin.
So, too, with the UMass nurse-scholars that Breslin praises so highly: "They work directly with patients to create models that will empower people," she says. She mentions such work as Ginny Chandler's on writing as an intervention for girls at risk of gang involvement, or Jeannine Young-Mason's on the role of compassion in facilitating recovery.
"Scholarship in the school is coalescing around the role of human interaction in health and healing," says Breslin. "Because when you think about it, that is the nurse's role—a very privileged role, a very intimate role. We're there when people come into the world and we're there when they leave it. We're there when people are most vulnerable, and that demands trust. I really think nurses are in a position, if we choose to, to take up the mantle of improved health care in this country."
Fulfillment of SON's potential as a powerhouse of nurse-scholarship means outreach on every level, from grassroots to national. The dean is an exemplar in this regard. Recently, for instance, she was named to a committee reporting to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services on nursing education.
"But it's not just me," says Breslin. "Cynthia Jacelon is president of the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses; that's like 9,000 nurses nationwide, and she's their leader, their spokesperson. Sitting on our faculty! Donna Zucker is regional representative for Sigma Theta Tau, our international honorary society—one of five or so leaders who meet at the national level. What a gift! Jeanine Young-Mason just won a national award for creativity from that group. So you see it's not about me; it's about a whole faculty who are putting us at the table at a national level."
From a clinic in a Springfield high school to the national councils of a professional organization, the fruit of outreach is expanding opportunities for practice and research, for faculty and students alike.
"Our goal is to create an environment that will entice young women and men to enter the profession, and then to choose the life of a nurse-scholar," says Breslin. "The faculty are the key: they're the innovators, the testers of new ideas.
"So the question for me becomes, how do I help them get the resources they need to do that? And the answer is, I'm their chief cheerleader. My job is to make sure they get the visibility they deserve."
– Patricia Wright
