Ten months into my tenure as dean, I’ve learned a lot:
a lot about the state of nursing, a lot about how and what we teach and study, and a lot about the challenges and opportunities our profession faces. It’s been my absolute pleasure to meet with dozens of our exceptional alumni and many of our terrific students and to settle into my new role.
In this issue, we celebrate the remarkable Dr. Barbara Brodie, who led a varied, expansive life as a pioneer of nurse practitioner education, a teacher and mentor, an early champion of nursing science and scholarship, and a fierce proponent of nursing history. From the 1970s and beyond, Brodie did precisely what nurse leaders do: invent a path into an unknown future with no roadmap and few signposts. While I am sure she struggled along the way, she also knew what she was helping create—systems to support capable, confident clinicians ready to offer high-quality care to patients and families—was larger than she was and critical to nursing’s momentum.
Dr. Brodie epitomized someone with a “strong back and soft front”: opinionated and ferociously committed but also intuitive, kind, and capable of mea culpa.
It strikes me that all of us—whether we’re deans, nurse scientists, nursing professors, or frontline clinicians—are doing just what Dr. Brodie did, but in a moment defined not primarily by gender and professional limitations but by pandemic-fed pain, burnout, and trauma. Just as Brodie fought for nurses’ agency, standing, and respect, we fight today to keep the nurse pipeline flowing and change people and systems so we can keep the exceptional nurses we already have.
None of this work is easy, but our goals are both clear and important. It’s why we’re teaching business and financial savvy to grad students (“Money Matters”), championing jobs and compensation models that match nurses’ strengths and education (“A Job Tailor-Made for a CNL”), and creating novel educational pathways for hospital systems that need them (“Acute-Care Certified: Why Sentara Partnered Up”).
I’m told Dr. Brodie’s former students used to have a saying: “What would Brodie say?” It’s my hope that, wherever Dr. Brodie is, she’s nodding in approval about how we’re doing our work, and how we’re taking nursing into its next iteration. As she was, we are changemakers, all of us.
Thank you for reading VNL.
Be well,
Marianne Baernholdt, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN
Sadie Heath Cabaniss Professor and Dean
UVA School of Nursing
P.S. I hope you can join me for an alumni-only event on UVA School of Nursing's graduate programs June 26 at 6 PM. "What can a nursing graduate degree do for YOU?" will feature four of our best and brightest alumni who've earned advanced nursing degrees from UVA and will share stories of their decision-making, experiences, and career trajectories with the group. So put on your orange and blue, don your UVA nursing pin, and be a part! RSVP here.
