Health Sciences celebrates 30 years of nursing across the region
Around 100 guests and Health Sciences staff attended a celebratory event on Wednesday to mark the University’s 30th anniversary since the Bachelor of Nursing undergraduate degree was first offered.
The evening was opened by Professor Adam Wheeler, Provost and Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University, and followed by a presentation detailing Health Sciences’ journey over the past 30 years by Dean of Sciences’, Professor Jessica Corner.
The guests included alumni from the past 30 years, healthcare professionals and noted representatives from Trust partners.
One alumni brought a photograph of her University nursing training group from 1981 and was pleased to be reunited with two University friends. When asked about their evening the group vowed ‘to keep in touch’ and were eager to reconnect with more nurses from their study days.
Many of those attending wore their original nursing badges which brought a great sense of community to the event and complemented the Faculty’s unique collection of nursing badges, memorabilia and photographs celebrating military and civilian nursing in the area.
The exhibition showcased nursing uniform over the decades including a WWI uniform, a 1960s Great Ormond Street uniform, the only remaining original 1900 uniform from The London Hospital and a replica dress that Florence Nightingale may have worn at the Scutari base in Turkey in 1853.
Staff and academics also got into the spirit of the evening dressing in period nursing costumes as ‘live exhibits’.
Guests were invited to tour the Faculty’s modern facilities with many expressing surprise at the advances in training and technology available today. Comparisons were made between the old practice of injecting into oranges against today’s nursing students being able to use venepuncture simulation through artificial mannequin skin.
Our University has been training nurses for the region for over 30 years this September. Starting from modest beginnings as a small school, it has now become the world’s leading Faculty of Health Sciences, one of the largest Health Sciences faculties in the UK and one of the top three providers in the UK.
Professor Alan Glasper, the University’s first professor of nursing who still holds a position today, comments: “This is a remarkable celebration of nursing which captures the legacy of nurses at work in the region. The event really captured the spirit of nursing over the past 30 years.
“It’s been wonderful to acknowledge how much teaching practice has changed but yet how compassion is still at the heart of the profession.”