“To Israel, to the Jewish people and to the backbone of healthcare: the nurses.”
Nancy Falchuk, former Hadassah national president, Nursing Task Force chair and a founding member of the Hadassah Medical Organization (HMO) Board of Directors, had lifted her glass and toasted to Hadassah’s new nursing research center at a dedication ceremony on January 7.
“We need more faculty. We need more academic nurses,” Falchuk said of the center, which opened in December 2023 in the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing and is being utilized to facilitate research that will help advance the quality of patient care.
Nurses Council Chair Robin Shuman, unable to attend the opening in Israel, spoke of this milestone in a letter read to attendees by Falchuk. “Despite the challenges that you are facing today, the importance of striving for excellence in providing the best possible nursing care and education persists.”
“We want to give the best care to our patients. How do we do that? We need evidence,” said Prof. Freda DeKeyser Ganz while closing out the event. “We need to show that what we’re doing is the best that we can do.”
“We sit in a faculty of medicine, and we want to move up in the world in the faculty of medicine. The bottom line is that the only way to do that is to be an academic. And the only way to do that is to do research.”
Dr. Rely Alon, director of nursing and health professions at HMO, commented about the center — “this special place” — and how it has been made possible because of the women of Hadassah pushing for it to happen. These women, she continued, are “helping us to create our dreams.”
The center was made possible through funds raised by Hadassah’s Nurses and Allied Health Professionals Council in America.
The idea for Hadassah’s Nurses Council came about more than 30 years ago. At a Hadassah convention, when Hadassah leaders and doctors attended in formal dress, two nurses spoke to the audience wearing a nurse’s uniform, cap and all. Surprised by the choice of outfit, Falchuk inquired about the occurrence with Hadassah’s national president at the time, who said she wanted everyone to know they were nurses. Yet there were thousands of nurses across the US, who had never — thus far — connected over their shared identities as Jewish women nurses. Today, the Nurses Council boasts around 7,000 members who raise funds and advocate for nursing programs and needs, and provides a space for mentoring, supporting and empowering colleagues.
Read more about Hadassah’s Nurses and Allied Health Professionals Council.
