Following welcomes from Dr. Wilson, Ball and CSUB Interim Vice President for University Advancement Heath Niemeyer, nurses joined together to recite the Nightingale Pledge, an oath named for Florence Nightingale in which nurses promise to faithfully practice their profession to its highest standards.
Dr. Peggy Leapley, who taught in the nursing program for 31 years and earned her post-master’s family nurse practitioner certificate from CSUB in 1999, was the first speaker. She led attendees in a look back on the program’s beginnings.
The CSUB nursing program got its start back when the university was California State College Bakersfield. Classes started in 1970 on a campus not yet fully developed and still frequently visited by the sheep who grazed on the property before the university was built, Dr. Leapley told the crowd. The nursing building opened in 1973.
The first group of nursing students, then dressed in blue and white skirted uniforms, helped to design the nursing cap and pin. The first graduating class also started the tradition of a class composite photo; theirs is framed and hangs in a prominent spot in the nursing building today, with composite photos from subsequent classes lining the building’s halls.
Nursing alumna and 2022 CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame inductee Terri Church followed Dr. Leapley by talking about nursing’s future. She pointed to the ways science fiction has at times predicted health care developments, like an early form of telemedicine seen in an episode of “The Jetsons.”
While health care providers might not have a tricorder like Dr. McCoy in “Star Trek” yet, there are many ways that medicine is advancing. Surgeons can now use robots to operate on patients, artificial blood can be created in a lab and smart watches monitoring heartrates are only the beginning of wearable health trackers, Church said. One of the more exciting developments, she said, is the potential of designer drugs tailor-made to target a patient’s specific illness.
“With all that comes a lot of issues that nursing will be involved in,” Church said. “How do we make that safe, how do we make it ethical, what are the moral ramifications? I’ve been a nurse for a long time — if anybody is going to raise that there is a moral issue out there, it’s going to be a nurse, so we play a really key role in that.”
Beyond advanced technologies, the future of nursing also holds an increased demand for advanced practice providers like nurse practitioners. (CSUB is already answering that call with a recently announced Doctor of Nursing Practice program, slated to begin in the fall of 2025.)
Motivational speaker Jean Steel gave the keynote address, called “Happy Nurses Win!” As nursing can be a demanding and exhausting job, Steel encouraged nurses to be resilient by asking for help when they need it, practicing gratitude daily, seeking out awe, keeping their sense of humor and being optimistic and mindful.
“You’re going to have the best days of your life nursing and you’re going to have some of the worst, so you have to take care of yourself,” Steel said. “You have a job that makes a difference every single day.”
Ball concluded this part of the event by reminding alums why they were there: to come home to their alma mater and walk its halls and also to learn how to get involved. Alums were encouraged to donate money or their time to the program to give back to the program that gave them their careers.
A CSUB alum herself, Ball got emotional looking out at the crowd of nurses.
“I can’t tell you how proud I am to be around all of you,” she said. “The amount of knowledge in this room, the amount of patients that have been impacted, by everyone in this room, is just amazing.”