Dean’s Corner

Since our last newsletter, our daily lives have changed radically due to COVID-19, a novel respiratory virus that has spread throughout the globe. “Stay home, stay healthy” is the motto provided by Governor Inslee in Washington State as we all innovate to negotiate school, work, and other settings. While all of us are charged with helping to bend the curve, change the course of this disease, and minimize hospital, community and family impacts, we are actively doing our part as a school across a variety of sectors. We can’t meet this mission without the incredible support of our community partners. In addition, we are very grateful to our community partners, faculty and students who are on the front lines of this pandemic. This moment in history has taught all of us, once again, that we cannot meet healthcare and community challenges without collaboration, collective effort, and an ethos of compassion and care. We are always thankful for your partnership and support, but this gratitude is even more pronounced during these challenging times. A LARGE thank you for the intensive efforts that our community partners are putting forward to serve diverse communities experiencing great need.

All of our staff, faculty and students are now working remotely and have worked tirelessly to make our students’ transition to an online Spring quarter as seamless as possible. At the school-level, we quickly innovated and launched an online instructional resource team. Faculty members Jody Early, Meghan Eagan-Torkko, Stefanie Iverson-Cabral and Stoerm Anderson were charged with carrying out a rapid needs assessment to determine faculty, staff and student needs in this transition. Their current work on adapting tailored capacity building and training is also helping those faculty not only in our school but many other faculty across campus.

Several of our faculty are on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic as well. Senior lecturer Jamie Shirley is serving as Chief of the Ethics Consultation Service at Northwest Hospital. Most recently, Jamie is working with ethicists and clinicians to prepare the region in the event our current situation hits crisis capacity and has insufficient resources to meet the needs of all patients. As such, she is providing ethical frameworks to guide fair, transparent and accountable decision-making for a variety of patient resources such as who receives an ICU bed and who receives a ventilator. Assistant professor Dan Bustillos is collaborating with the Washington State Public Health Association to integrate students from his spring “Pandemics” course into the solutions that are identified as top needs and priorities by the State. Lecturer Stefanie Iverson-Cabral is, not ironically, teaching a course on “Isolation and Quarantine” online this Spring that is taking real time events into account while placing the pandemic into its proper historical context (See: /news/march-2020/quarantine-course.

In addition, as the pandemic progresses, our #2 nationally ranked MN program currently has students (link to MN program) that are actively pivoting their fieldwork hours to make an impact on the COVID pandemic. In a series of news articles that will be featured on UW Bothell’s website, we will be detailing the educational, policy and clinical creativity that our students have displayed during this crisis.

Not only is it the Year of the Nurse and Midwife in 2020, but it was also National Public Health week from April 6-12th ! We are therefore proud and pleased to recognize the significant contributions and leadership that our faculty, staff and students are making to improve community, public and global health every day and during the pandemic.

Take good care and stay well.

Shari L. Dworkin, Ph.D., M.S.

Dean and Professor

School of Nursing & Health Studies