May 19, 2020

The Ohio State University College of Nursing recognized two alumni for their phenomenal work with students in the first annual Preceptor Awards. Derrick Grey, MS, PMHNP, was awarded the 2020 Preceptor Achievement Award. Cynthia Milich, MS, CNP, received the 2020 Preceptor of the Year Award.

October 19, 2016

A graduate of the College of Nursing, who helped fight Ebola in West Africa and treated patients in Haiti, has been awarded for his early career achievements by The Ohio State University Alumni Association.

John Welch was presented with the 2016 William Oxley Thompson Award, given to young alumni who have demonstrated distinctive achievement in a career, civic involvement or both. 

“We are so very proud to call him one of our own,” said Colleen Pelasky, BA, assistant director for alumni engagement for the College of Nursing. “He has unwaveringly and selflessly served local and international communities and made important contributions to the world of healthcare along the way. John embodies our college’s vision to achieve what others consider impossible.”

Following his bachelor of science degree in nursing from Ohio State in 2003, Welch earned a master’s degree from Boston College. He later worked as a pediatric and cardiac critical-care nurse in Columbus, Ohio; California; Washington D.C.; and Australia. In 2012, he joined Boston Children’s Hospital as an associate nurse anesthetist before being promoted to senior nurse anesthetist in March 2014, specializing in pediatric cardiac anesthesia.

While working at Boston Children’s Hospital, Welch joined the Boston-based healthcare and social justice nongovernmental organization Partners in Health (PIH) in 2013. PIH works to address the root causes of illness for many suffering from poverty or marginalization caused by injustice. Welch’s introduction to global health came when PIH opened a 300-bed teaching hospital, University Hospital Mirabalais (UHM) in Haiti’s impoverished rural Central Plateau district.

Welch’s role in Haiti was a combination of anesthesia practice, teaching, mentorship, advocacy, program development, operations management and even student. Through a massive amount of time, effort and perseverance, Welch helped UHM improve in a major way. By September 2014, UHM was performing nearly 300 surgeries per month, more than any hospital in Haiti. The anesthesia-related mortality rate declined, surgical schedule efficiency increased and the UHM nurse anesthesia program he helped guide welcomed its first class of students.

Welch’s lengthy list of career accomplishments might earn him the label of overachiever for a 35-year-old. Yet his drive is not rooted in a desire to gain kudos, rather in a longtime discomfort with inequality. As a high-school student, Welch accompanied his church group from Woodville, Ohio, for a week-long trip to Columbus to help set up summer Bible school for youth at a Christian church on the city’s south side.

“A lot of kids would turn up without shoes or would be clearly there for the snack time and it just really struck me that we can sing songs and we can glue macaroni on paper but what these kids need is for us to stay and to provide something other than just singing songs about God,’’ he said. “At the end of that week, I was just unsettled by the fact that that was enough for any of us.”

Welch’s ambition to care for the health needs of vulnerable populations led him to West Africa in 2014 to help fight Ebola. After special training in Liberia to work in an Ebola treatment unit, Welch helped PIH roll out treatment units in multiple districts in Liberia.

When transmission of Ebola raged in Sierra Leone, Welch turned his attention there. In the short run, Welch helped the treatment units there improve the quality of care and increase the pipeline of medical supplies; in the long run, he leveraged the work of his PIH teams to improve the Ebola response nationwide. By January 2015, PIH had opened 21 Ebola facilities across six districts. In Welch’s seven months in West Africa, PIH cared for nearly 2,000 suspected Ebola patients.

Being back in the United States for the past year, Welch had a chance to return to a regular sleep schedule, yet that left him yearning for the rigors of his schedule in West Africa and Haiti.

“I long for the 20-hour days and the seven-day work weeks. When you’re in the field doing the work, you think a lot about being at home. When you’re at home, the only thing you can think about is being out in the field and doing the work.”

Days after receiving his Alumni Association Award, Welch was on a flight to Haiti to work with victims of the most recent hurricane.

September 30, 2016

The College of Nursing Alumni Society has just received three major awards, including Society of the Year, among the 46 Ohio State University alumni societies.

This is the first time the alumni society for nursing was named Society of the Year and the fourth year in a row it was recognized by The Ohio State University Alumni Association as an Outstanding Alumni Society. 

“We’ve put in a lot of effort to start some projects we feel very passionate about. I think this showcases the passion and the drive our members have,’’ said Kelsie Miller, president-elect of The Ohio State University College of Nursing Alumni Society. 

The society has over 1,600 sustaining and life members, and many committed members participate in events every year, Miller said.

The third award the society received was Program of the Year, for the society’s largest annual fundraising event, a wine tasting and silent auction held at the Ohio Union. Begun a decade ago, the summer event raised $13,500 in 2015 and $18,000 in 2016, all for student scholarships. With those contributions, along with other private support, the College of Nursing awarded scholarships to 135 students in 2015, totaling over $500,000.

The College of Nursing Alumni Society was among three Ohio State alumni societies to receive the program award this year. The event has led to increased membership for both the Ohio State Alumni Association and the College of Nursing Alumni Society.

All three nursing alumni society awards show what can be accomplished with a very committed staff and group of alumni, according to Craig Little, director of alumni societies for The Ohio State University Alumni Association.

“They set themselves up with goals and stuck to those goals, focused their energy and programming around those goals, and they’re reaping the benefits of their efforts,’’ Little said.

To learn more about the Alumni Society’s mission, goals and membership criteria, visit go.osu.edu/buckeyenursing

For information about upcoming society and College of Nursing events, visit go.osu.edu/NursingAlumniEvents

September 30, 2016

Four The Ohio State University College of Nursing alumni have received awards from the College of Nursing Alumni Society for their outstanding contributions locally and abroad.

 

Kristine Weiss Adams, MSN, CNP, received the Community Service Award. She is a certified nurse practitioner at the Cleveland Clinic, where she has spent the majority of her 24-year career. After graduating from the Ohio State College of Nursing in 1992, her career navigated through different specialty areas, including intensive care and post-anesthesia care units, medical-surgical nursing and home healthcare. Practicing in these varied areas gave Adams a view of healthcare that led her in 2008 to a magnet coordinator position for the Cleveland Clinic Fairview Hospital. Two years later, she became a nurse practitioner.

 

Susan K. Frazier, PhD, RN, FAHAreceived the Mildred E. Newton Distinguished Educator Award. Frazier earned a BSN, MS and PhD in nursing from the Ohio State College of Nursing, where she also taught for 10 years, before accepting a position in 2015 as an associate professor at the University of Kentucky.  Before pursuing her graduate degrees, Frazier practiced as a certified critical-care nurse for nearly 20 years. During that time, she was instrumental in establishing and managing the intensive care unit of the local hospital Holzer Medical Center in southeastern Ohio.

 

Pamela K. Greene, PhD, RNwhose research and career have focused on suicide prevention, received the Distinguished Alumna Award. As a psychiatric nurse for over 40 years, she has worked in various positions, ranging from a captain in the U.S. Air Force Nurse Corps to the chief nursing officer and senior vice president of The Menninger Clinic, a Houston psychiatric hospital. During her tenure at Menninger, she also had a joint appointment as an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Greene received a bachelor of science and master’s degree from the Ohio State College of Nursing and received her doctorate degree in nursing from Texas Woman’s University. She now works as an associate professor at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.

 

Sarah R. Meyer, PhD, a pediatric nurse practitioner, received the Distinguished Alumna Award. After receiving her bachelor of science degree in nursing from the Ohio State College of Nursing in 2007, she went on to attain a master’s of science degree as an acute-care pediatric nurse practitioner with a minor in global health from the University of California San Francisco, where she completed the Global Health Scholars Program. For much of her career, Meyer has focused on pediatric emergency medicine in Level I trauma centers. She currently divides her time between Haiti and Los Angeles, working as the pediatric ICU nurse educator at a hospital in Haiti and as an acute-care pediatric nurse practitioner at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ Level 1 Trauma pediatric emergency department. Meyer spent this past year as a Global Health Nursing Fellow at UCSF, living and working in Hinche, Haiti.

 

The awards for the four alumni recipients will be presented Friday night at a dinner ceremony at Red Brick Occasions.

 

For more information about the Alumni Society award recipients, visit go.osu.edu/NursingAwardRecipients.

March 30, 2012

Deborah Steward, associate professor in the College of Nursing, has been named a recipient of the 2012 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. The prestigious award honors superior teaching by Ohio State faculty. A surprise presentation was made by Boehm and Griffin, president and CEO of the Ohio State Alumni Association.

Steward has been a faculty member at Ohio State since 1999.