Helen Elizabeth ("Betty") Cawston (BSN '60)
Betty was a respected and well-loved professor known for her fairness and devotion to nursing. She had an open-door policy and spent many hours supporting and counselling students. In addition she had a wonderful sense of humour!
Betty retired in 1982 and lived in her home in Vancouver with her sister Margaret. With her close friend, Beth McCann, she toured New Zealand and the South Pacific. When Beth died suddenly in 1986, Betty organized Beth’s numerous and lengthy files and memorabilia - a massive undertaking - and presented them to the School They have become an integral part of the School’s Historical Collection, many accepted by the UBC Archives.
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Margaret J. Harrison (BSN '64)
Margaret Harrison is a Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta. She has a BSN from the University of British Columbia, an MSN from the University of Rhode Island, and a PhD (Family Studies) from the University of Alberta.
Her primary areas of expertise are community health nursing and family nursing and currently has a research program that focuses on early parenting of premature infants and child development and behaviour outcomes during preschool and school years. Her other research interests include the use of nursing diagnosis in community health and the health of low-income women. ...read more.
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Ann Hilton (BSN '68)
A graduate of the BSN program in 1968, Ann began her nursing career in Toronto as a Team Leader on a nursing research unit at Sunnybrook Hospital. She later joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Nursing. She did her masters degree at U of T and after working at the Respiratory Care Unit at Toronto General Hospital, she studied the sleep of patients in a respiratory care unit using EEG, EOG, EMG and observation for 48 continuous hours, a ground-breaking piece of work for her master’s thesis. She was then recruited to UBC as an Assistant Professor in 1974 where she continued to work until her retirement in 2005. From 1983 to 1986 she completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. She was promoted from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor and retired as Professor Emerita....read more.
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Rose Murakami (BSN '62)
Rose Murakami was born into a family of Japanese Canadian pioneers. Her mother was the first child of Japanese descent to be born in the fishing community of Steveston, BC. In 1942, their family including three year old Rose, were forcibly removed from their Salt Spring Island ancestral farm, separated, and interned in central B.C. for the duration of the Second World War.
Rose was intensely committed to clinical practice, she maintained a full clinical teaching load, primarily at St. Paul’s Hospital, in addition to her teaching and coordinating activities. She was known for her exceptionally high standards, combined with a supportive manner with students and junior faculty. In 1981, Rose became director of nursing at the Purdy Pavilion for Extended Care at the UBC Health Sciences Centre.
Although she rarely made direct mention her own family’s wartime experience, its powerful lessons were felt in the classroom in her insistence on clarity of thought, the rigorous analysis of the implications of ideas, and of separating belief from knowledge. Social justice remains a pervasive feature of the curriculum within which UBC nurses learn the profession today.
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Pam Ottem (BSN '67, MSN '75)
Pam graduated with a BSN in 1967 and an MSN in 1975. She keeps in touch regularly with her classmates of 1967, meeting with them most recently in beautiful Waterton Lakes, Alberta.
Pam has had a varied and exciting work-life. She was interested in a career in psychiatric nursing. After graduating in 1967 she worked at VGH wanting to work in psychiatry but ended up working in pediatrics. She taught at UBC for a few years in Psychiatry and Gerontology, and then worked in the Extended Care Unit at UBC as an educator, at Mount St. Joseph’s as Director of Extended Care for eight years and finally as a Nursing Practice Consultant with the CRNBC. She is semi –retired now, working part time in the Fraser Health with a Clinical Nurse Specialist in orthopaedics.
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Bernadet ("Kiss") Ratsoy (BSN '68)
When she went into nursing she was very impressed with the pristine look of the uniforms nurses wore at the time and at how nurses carried themselves in those uniforms. “One of the most devastating experiences as a 17 year-old was discovering that these uniforms were held together by safety pins and clips which were taken off along with the buttons so that they could be starched.”
She initiated and was responsible for developing the Family Centred Maternity Care Program at St. Paul’s in 1972; it was one of the first in Canada and was designated by the provincial government as the only alternate program to the (then) Grace Maternity Hospital in Vancouver.
Among her many accomplishments is initiating a Staff Nurses Journal Club for recognition and professional development of senior nurses in 1981. In 2002 it was renamed the Bernadet Ratsoy Journal Club. The members still meet.
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Alison Rice (BSN '67)
Alison launched a pioneering “pilot project” to convince the health care system and the public of the contributions that midwifery could make to maternal child care. Alison and her colleagues were the activists whose contributions eventually resulted in the legalization of midwifery in British Columbia.
She was among the early faculty participants in the School’s Punjab-based Guru Nanak Partnership Project in 1998, bringing to India her solid expertise in nursing education and her grounding in maternal child care. Over a career of almost 33 years, Alison was respected by her colleagues as a feisty feminist activist, a diehard proponent of safe and effective women’s health service, and someone who has never shied away from a political battle if she believed it in the best interest of the people she served.
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Colleen Stainton (BSN '61)
Colleen was the first Clinical Chair of Women’s Health Nursing in the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Sydney and the Centre for Women’s Health Nursing, Royal Hospital for Women.
From early on Colleen’s interest lay in maternity and neonatal care. Her career focus was to improve the nursing and midwifery role in health care through linking and integrating education, research and practice.
Since the age of three, Colleen wanted to be a nurse, and throughout her career she embraced challenging projects and roles from lobbying to retain a women’s hospital in Calgary to developing curriculum and research in maternal-infant care with professionals from Nigeria, Taiwan, Sweden, Canada and Japan. ...read more.
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