By Rachel Person, WSU College of Nursing student

Botanical Gardens and Vocational Nurse’s College 

For the first half of our day, we visited a botanical garden where various plants were being grown for traditional medicinal purposes. We were greeted by a guide who took us around the garden and showed us samples of the plants to either smell or taste.

Some of the plants and trees were familiar such as cilantro, mint, vanilla, and rubber. Others were not. We were introduced to Guianensis, which is known to stimulate the immune system and is therefore used to treat diseases like cancer. Achiote was a round fruit with a spiky outer shell … » More …

Melody Rasmor, clinical assistant professor at the WSU College of Nursing-Vancouver, will be honored by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners as a leader in the profession in Washington.

She’ll receive the AANP Nurse Practitioner State Award for Excellence at the organization’s national conference in June.

Rasmor has been a family nurse practitioner since 1982, a time when the profession was on the rise but still not widespread. She was a school nurse but felt like she needed more education to do her job better, she said.

“It was a pioneer kind of role then,” she said recently.

After becoming a nurse practitioner, she went … » More …

Imagine being a nurse practitioner serving patients in a county that’s larger than Rhode Island, but has just 5,300 residents and one medical clinic.

In the West, that’s the reality – and the challenge – for many rural healthcare providers.

We’re accustomed to hearing about America’s opioid epidemic as if it’s monolithic, but there are striking differences in how opioid use disorder affects men and women.

Any health care provider in Washington is likely to encounter patients who use opioids, either legally prescribed or illegally obtained.

Caring for those patients takes teamwork and communication – skills that now are being taught to students in the medicine, pharmacy and nursing programs at WSU Health Sciences.

A research study led by Teresa Bigand, who’ll receive her PhD from the WSU College of Nursing next month, was honored at a graduate-student research expo in Pullman recently.

Bigand’s study explored the effects of cannabis on people who use opioids for pain.

It was awarded a second-place finish in the Medical and Life Sciences category at the Graduate and Professional Student Association Research Exposition. There were 192 submissions to that exposition, with 80 research projects accepted for … » More …

WSU College of Nursing senior Jacquelyn Deichman won a top award at the university’s undergraduate research showcase last week with her work on treatment of adolescent concussions.

The Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) was held on March 25 in Pullman.

Deichman took home a Crimson Award in the Social Sciences category for her poster, “Return-to-play Legislation and Concussions: Are More Youth Leaving the Emergency Department Without Being Seen?”

Her mentor was Janessa Graves, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing.

Deichman conducted the research for her WSU Honors College thesis. She used data to gauge whether a decade-old law … » More …

Only one group of teenagers used marijuana more often after retail sales were legalized in Washington than they did before – high school seniors who work 11 or more hours per week, according to new research led by a WSU College of Nursing professor.

On April 3-5, 2019, the WSU College of Nursing will host an on-site accreditation review by the CCNE for the nursing program:

Doctor of Nursing Practice 

Betty Harrington, one of the founders of WSU’s intercollegiate nursing education program, has died at the age of 95.