A Tribute to Donna Diers - The Lancet

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University School of Nursing (YSN), and American ... lady. She welcomed me to YSN more than 30 years ago (when I was fresh out of my MasterÕs program),.
EDITORIAL

A Tribute to Donna Diers Martha Kirk Swartz, PhD, RN, CPNP, FAAN

Earlier this year, the nursing profession lost a great voice with the passing of Donna Diers, the Annie W. Goodrich Professor Emerita, sixth Dean of the Yale University School of Nursing (YSN), and American Academy of Nursing Living Legend. To me, Donna Diers was a genius, and a very kind lady. She welcomed me to YSN more than 30 years ago (when I was fresh out of my MasterÕs program), and since then I rarely missed an opportunity to hear her speak. She fully understood the work of nursing in all of its forms, and she continually encouraged all of us to broaden our own understanding of that work so we might better assess its impact. Beyond nursing, Donna was an advocate and scholar of the arts and humanities—of history, music, literature, and the spoken and written word. Among her many accomplishments, Donna led the development of advanced practice nursing and the engagement of nursing in public policy. She wrote one of the first textbooks on nursing research, and her own research utilizing large hospital data systems has informed clinical, operational, and financial decision making in health care settings throughout the world. For eight years, Donna served as editor for Image— Journal of Nursing Scholarship, the journal of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing. In that role, and in her unique, inimitable way, Donna eloquently wrote on topics as myriad as clinical scholarship, lessons in leadership, and why nurses should write and publish. All of her writings reflect her keen intellect, her uncanny ability to create meaning by putting thoughts into words, and her dry, spot-on sense of humor. Many of her writings were published in her anthology Speaking of Nursing.Narratives of Practice, Research, Policy and the Profession (Diers, 2004), which I highly recommend to each of you.

We have lost a legend in the nursing profession, but the work of Donna Diers lives on in her eloquent writing. As we memorialized Donna here at YSN, we turned back to a piece she wrote for the Yale Nursing Matters magazine (Diers, 2002) entitled, ‘‘Knowing What I Know Now, Would I Do It Again?’’*: Would I choose nursing, over, say, journalism or miniature making, teaching English or playing cocktail piano in smoky bars? Or even professional basketball. Tall women now have interesting career choices.. Would I choose again the terror of caring for my first patient?. Would I again choose psychiatric nursing?. As a faculty member, would I choose again to mine my own and otherÕs experience to begin to build a science of practice? Would I have chosen to try to speak about the personal experience it is to care? Would I have chosen to live in the vast range of scientific, political, and policy issues, the issues of the rights and privileges and obligations of women professionals? Would I have chosen nursing if I had known how deep the sexism and nursism and public discrimination and invisibility are? And how much fun it would be to fight those monsters? Would I have chosen nursing if I had known the excitement of pushing forward the boundaries of human service and participating in changing the health care system, shaping it? Would I have chosen nursing if I could have anticipated the experience of being in the company of those who do this work? You betcha. REFERENCES Diers, D. (2002, May/June). Knowing what I know now, would I do it again? Yale Nursing Matters, 3(2). Retrieved from http:// nursing.yale.edu/donna-diers-passes-away-february-24 Diers, D. (2004). Speaking of nursing...narratives of practice, research, policy and the profession. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

J Pediatr Health Care. (2013) 27, 239. 0891-5245/$36.00 Copyright Q 2013 by the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pedhc.2013.03.006

www.jpedhc.org

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Copyright by the Yale School of Nursing. Reprinted with permission.

July/August 2013

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