Leader, visionary,
dean
An open letter to incoming
students and faculty
I have been proud to serve as your Dean of the UT School of Nursing since 1984. For more than two decades, I have made it my personal mission to attract the diverse, dedicated and caring individuals our nursing profession sorely needs. I have been involved in recruiting qualified students to our programs and making our school a model innovator for attracting nontraditional students to our calling. As we face a rising shortage of educated nurses, we are happy to report that our male enrollment is 15 percent higher than the national average and the number of adults pursuing a second career in nursing is increasing.
In the past several years, we have reached certain milestones in our history that indicate that we are achieving several of the dreams that I’ve long held for our school. First, we achieved a top ten percent ranking for academic excellence among all graduate nursing schools in the country. We have done this by striving to be the best we can conceivably be, through the genius of our nurse scholars and the diligence and dedication of our students. We have earned our reputation as an institution founded on excellence
that fosters excellence, tempered with humility and generosity.
Our nurses are highly skilled and committed to their calling. Furthermore, our nurses care. For the patient. For the patient’s family. For the community. I was once given a stamp from China marked with the symbol for nurse. The symbol translates to watchful eyes. I can think of no more appropriate symbol for the nursing profession.
It captures the very essence of the nurse’s role – vigilance – being alert to the patient’s condition and maintaining a constant state of awareness. This is a state of being that will draw on all of your knowledge and all of your powers of observation.
You will also be the face of health care. You will have far more contact with your patients than the physicians. They will look to you to have the clinical knowledge, the education, the familiarity with the latest health care technologies and methodologies, and they will expect you to explain these things to them in terms that they can understand. They will expect you to lead them through the unknowns of recovery and allay their fears. And they will expect you to always remember that they are humans in need of care.
The most basic responsibility of nursing is caring for the whole person. And those of you who are called to the profession know in your hearts that there is no more noble or re-warding profession in the world. Welcome to The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston. We’re here to help you realize your highest health care aspiration and achieve your true potential.
Patricia L. Starck, DSN, RN, FAAN
Dean of The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston |
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Dean Starck is a born leader. She is also a nurse, a manager, an educator, a dreamer and a born caregiver. Since 1984, she has led the UT School of Nursing in the direction of achieving excellence in all activities, practices and especially in the education of exceptionally skilled and sought-after nurse graduates. She does this with a sure hand and practiced eye for nursing talent. She is, after all, a licensed registered nurse with graduate degrees in rehabilitation nursing and community/mental health nursing, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Dean Starck earned her Doctorate in nursing from the University of Alabama in Birmingham and her Master’s of nursing from Emory University in Atlanta.
A graduate of the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University, Dean Starck is also the John P. McGovern Distinguished Professor in Nursing. She is the recipient of several major research grants and has published dozens of scholarly papers and abstracts. She has contributed chapters to nursing texts and is a well-published author in health care journals. As a popular guest speaker, she has lectured at the World Congress of Viktor Frankl’s Logo-therapy, the American Pain Society, before numerous nursing organizations, and at a host of prestigious colleges and universities. Appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Statewide Health Coordinating Council (SHCC) in 2002, she is co-chair of the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies, an organization that focuses on nursing supply and demand issues, such as the critical short supply of nurses and nurse educators. She is also active in a wide selection of professional and community organizations.
But perhaps her most striking characteristic is her drive. Her remarkable achievements since 1984 bear testament to the school’s top five percent ranking among graduate nursing schools in the country; the new and environmentally responsible UT School of Nursing home on the Texas Medical Center campus; her innovative, accelerated nursing programs; and the success of the school’s Distance Learning programs. All are groundbreaking, leading edge accomplishments that collectively set the UT School of Nursing on a different plane from many of its peers. And all are institutional ambitions that could only have come from the profound caring and relentless drive of Dean Starck.
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