An Honorary Degree of Master of Science (Nursing) was conferred on Sr M. Laurentia Roche and an Honorary Degree of Master of Education (Science Education) on Randal L. Henley.

Today’s conferrings also included the first cohort of MSc in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The aim of this two-year cyclical part-time Masters programme is to provide postgraduate education in Obstetrics and Gynaecology for clinical students (medical graduates), to enhance their academic understanding of the speciality and to provide thorough clinical training. It was also the first graduation for students of the new four-year BSc Midwifery programme. These graduates are now Registered Midwives, a qualification previously only available to Registered Nurses who undertook an additional postgraduate midwifery programme.

The ceremonies conclude tomorrow (December 8th).

Picture: Zhang Qi, a graduate of Beijing Technology and Business University (BTBU), China who was conferred with a Master’s degree in Food Marketing today (December 7th 2010) pictured with UCC President, Dr Michael Murphy.

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Conferring Address by Mike Fitzgerald, Chief Executive Officer, Altobridge Limited, December 7th 2010
President, members of the governing body, distinguished guests, parents and most importantly you the graduates.

This is not only an important day for you, it is an important day for the Irish economy and in some cases it is an important day for some foreign economies. You are the business leaders of our future and in many respects the future of economic growth rests squarely on your shoulders. Your intellect is great and great intellects are needed now more than ever. However, your challenge is also great. You enter a very different world to that which the UCC alumni entered before you. You enter a new economy, arguably the 3^rd ‘new economy’ of the last decade. Competition is more extreme; Asia has arrived. Growth Capital is an endangered species and too many economies are reeling from reckless management.

This economy has unique characteristics in that it will have many shackles, regulations, new rules of engagement all culminating in a genuine protection against a recurrence of what we have witnessed. Growth and regulation must now journey together hand in hand. Success will depend on your ability to maneuver profitability in between them. Your ideas, your thoughts your creativity will be vital as we strive to work our way back to growth. Remember your creativity is unique - it is not bias nor is it wounded. Instead it is based on years and years of hard work studying the works of great business analysts and leaders, real research and real analysis of the case studies from the plethora of great business of the past and present.

This gives you an edge, an edge on us – those who have gone before you, those who have tried, succeeded or maybe tried, failed and tried again. We have the experience you have the inspiring intellect; teaming up together and working together as a team should underwrite our future success. We need you because the wood and the trees have become one. We need you to identify the best opportunity from the long list of prospects, we need you to spot the flaw in an existing business model, introduce new thinking in operational efficiency and make our businesses more competitive, more profitable - more successful.

But success is not easily achieved. While the media tends to focus on great wins, great stories, great exits, great funding rounds; they never see the effort, they never feel the pain, they never witness the periods companies go through where they are surviving through challenging times – by the skin of their teeth. When Padraig Harrington won his first major, in the interview that immediately followed his reaction was surprising; he argued that he made things so difficult for himself, almost too difficult, he observed that nothing every came easy for him and he stated that he would seriously have considered giving up golf if he hadn’t won that major.

Why? He is a professional, someone that practices more than any other, someone who is always mentally prepared. How could he think like this? How different is his world to ours. He too experiences a grueling work environment, huge sacrifice, daily mediocrity mixed together with exultation, disaster, flashes of brilliance, genuine mistakes and a pinch of luck. As Harrington summed it up; ‘I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

I’ve had my own wins, my own failures. I led a Management Buy Out, brought the company to profitability and sold it for a significant return for shareholders. I started a company 7 years ago and we have now grown to 140 employees. In the meantime we spun off two separate companies. However, after each success I have had, I can honestly say; I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. None of them came easy, not one and I don’t expect any future events to be any different.

There is however a foundation for success, hard work. Often based on a good feasibility study, good primary market research, a good understanding of customer requirements and from this we are able to identify the greatest possible potential for the product or service. However, we need to stick to the evidence, opinions can be lethal when they are not based on real evidence, real customer requirements. For you your most important talent could be the ability to take that evidence and with it make the necessary calculated decision on which way to go. From that decision we may find growth. As you gain experience and rise up through companies or you start your own company you will find fewer and fewer of your colleagues around you will be willing to take those hard business decisions. Everyone can cut back, everyone knows how to slash costs, very few can make growth happen. You may often feel isolated, frustrated but making sure those decisions are made can prove vital for your company. You have a responsibility to take that calculated risk, not doing so is often the beginning of the end for many companies. It is the road less travelled but it is your road.

Perseverance will be required but don’t slip into the dangerous world of dreams and ideals, if it just isn’t going to happen, move on, adapt. Failure and success meet at a certain point and you need to be the one to see how that scale is tipping, early.

After 22 years on the road living in places like China, the US, England, Sweden I would like to make one worthwhile observation; I found Irish business people to be ‘above average listeners’. Maybe it’s our history, maybe it’s in our Celtic genes but whatever the reason the ability to listen and respect every customer across every tradition is a fundamental driver of success. If we listen we will see the opportunity, we can then adapt, we can improvise and we can even deliver something the customer actually wants.

That face to face hour with the customer is critical, impressing them yes – but listen too. Don’t find yourself outside the meeting room happy with the presentation you made but in the dark with respect to what the customer actually wants. Get to really know your customer, listen to their requirements and learn to adapt your pitch in real time. If your pitch fits, getting the deal across the line is easier. But don’t be disingenuous – walk away if it really doesn’t fit. Credibility is king in a world where too many have been burned.

You are creativity. From you there can be growth. From you we can have success. And yes, because of your actions, people will laugh and celebrate and unfortunately they may also cry - but remember the worlds of T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets):

‘For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.’

ENDS

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Conferring Address by Dr Ann Whall, Visiting Professor UCC; Professor Emerita, University of Michigan (USA); Allesse Endowed Chair, Oakland University (USA), December 7th 2010
I am honoured to be invited to deliver this Graduation Address within the country of my forbearers, and the home of my present Visiting Professor Assignment. I will address, A Cautionary tale concerning Advances in Health Care.

I‘ve noted you are the honoured graduates of Midwifery as well as three Nursing programmes; I believe my comments are relevant to all of your fields, and although my education/experience in Nursing is primarily within the US, I have worked briefly within this country and the UK, Also with our present intense Globalization, I believe this message is increasingly urgent today.

Upon my graduation (decades ago) from a hospital nursing programme, I sought additional education at a Liberal Arts college. I was told that “without question”, Nursing and other Allied health fields were considered by those in academe, to be trade schools (like auto mechanics). I found this very offensive….but at that same time ….I saw it as a great opportunity to develop the Knowledge Base that was greatly needed.

I went quickly (just down the street) to a new collegiate school of nursing wherein I was told that indeed nursing and other health care fields were admitted to academe provisionally because of their somewhat “ limited body of knowledge”. They were provisionally allowed to grant Bachelor of Science degrees.

The major reason for this restriction was the limited theoretical and philosophical bases not explicated within these fields. This meant that their related/ accompanying research (and thus empirical knowledge) was almost nonexistent.

The Nursing programme at that school accepted this challenge and faculty began developing their grand level theories that explicated their philosophic/theoretical positions found across time within nursing. These grand theories allowed for development of more precise middle range theories upon which clinical studies and evidence based practice began to be produced. These grand theories also identified, “Four Ways of Knowing” as necessary for clinical practice. These are: ethical knowledge,artistic/aesthetic knowledge, personal/experiential knowledge, and yes the very important empirical knowledge.

One might have considered this tale now a “case closed”, until troubling applications of this knowledge began to be emerge. Specifically the exemplar case of the interdisciplinary “Tuskegee Experiment” which Nurses ran, and in which African American males with syphilis were randomly assigned to treatment/no treatment groups, in part to document progression of the disease. Evidently empirical knowledge was more important than ethical, aesthetic and personal knowledge. The film “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” is emblematic of the dominance of empirics over other historically important values. In this film Nurse Ratchet had the man who was disrupting her psychotherapy group, lobotomized. That was an efficient empirical way of handing the problem, although the reasoning ignored the traditional ethics, aesthetics, and personal knowing values.

Very well I thought, but that was a couple of decades ago and things like that can no longer happen. One day, however, roughly six years ago, I read a draft of the requirements for a Doctorate in Nursing Practice Degree (published by the American Academy of Collegiate Schools of Nursing or AACSN).

As you know the explosion of empirical/technical knowledge within health care demands additional training/education. (For example it is now possible to grow body parts using someone’s DNA/other material). Most fields in the US in allied health such as Physical Therapy, Clinical Pharmacy, etc. now offer such extended graduate preparation with a clinical doctorate.

The AACN draft I read, proposed the elimination of all Philosophical/meta-theoretical knowledge from the DNP curriculum! I wrote an editorial titled “Lest we forget” to the official publication (titled Nursing Outlook) of the American Academy of Nursing, and eventually this material was re-included within the DNP preparation. But once again we might say, “how nice…end of story”.

But sorry to say, that it is not the end of the story. In case the Midwifery graduates have concluded that this is a lack of ethical and other types of knowledge is a problem within Nursing alone, I invite you to read a publication that Midwife Marlene Sinclair and I wrote about this situation within Midwifery published in Nursing Outlook, Volume 54 in 2006.

Last year I was hospitalised overnight for a voluntary procedure. The nursing care again was an exemplar of the technical explosion of empirical knowledge within health care. Masters level Advanced Nurse Practitioners assigned to my case examined a copy of my electrocardiogram that was generated within two minutes of my admission. They read the configuration of electronic waves and explained to me that I had a pattern typical of someone with low potassium levels. Because they had prescriptive privileges, they administered the appropriate medication.

How wonderful I thought because in the vast lands on the US plains, such nurse practitioners run tiny clinics with WWW access to medical and allied health specialists at regional health centers. Advanced assessments by these nurses using standardized protocols and/or the sending of X-ray, lab results, etc., to specialists at regional health centers, results in expert level inter-disciplinary care. Thus expert clinical knowledge, not patients or staff is transported across long distances.

Since nurses now perform such advanced care, nursing assistants perform bathing, bed changing, and certain procedures, etc. My roommate had undergone a double leg amputation and had an early morning procedure scheduled. Nursing assistants were loudly discussing various topics outside our door when my roommate put on her call button and asked, if they might lower the volume because of her early morning procedure. The ”managing” nursing assistant returned with a handful of plastic earplugs, tossed them on the bed and said to the patient “use these”. The ethics, aesthetics, personal/experiential knowledge, and the empirical knowledge underlying this nursing care seemed purposely ignored. I conclude that expert technology frees the advanced nurse practitioner, but that this practitioner can never abdicate the responsibility for care.

In conclusion, you will practice in a world in which the rate and complexity of technical-empirical knowledge increases exponentially. If you forget that other types of knowledge must accompany these devastatingly powerful empirical/technical advances, then the Brave New World that George Orwell described is about to occur.

I do not believe this will happen. When I was first told that nursing was only a “mechanical trade”, I seized that opportunity. I know that you too will “seize” this great opportunity that lies before you, that of the joining of ethical, aesthetic, and personal/experiential knowledge with that wonderful empirical technical knowledge that you are about to experience.

ENDS

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