1983 Articulation agreement established with Pace University .

1985 School's Associate degree program accredited by the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission.

1987 School moved to new quarters on the ninth floor of 310 East 22 nd Street .

1992 Cynthia Chesner, R.N., Ed.D. is appointed Dean.

2001 Janet Mackin, R.N., Ed.D. becomes Dean.

2004 Dr. Mackin becomes Dean of the Long Island College Hospital School of Nursing (in addition to Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing.)

2005 The School will move to a new home at 776 Sixth Avenue

The legal parameters of patient and caregiver have changed much since the 1970s. Now is the age of consent and all that entails. The American Nurses Association has stated that nurses do have the responsibility for facilitating informed decision making. A nurse's role is vital in assessing the patient's ability to understand informed consent, determining the best time during which to approach the patient to obtain informed consent, and reaffirming that the patient understood what he or she consented to and claimed to understand. Nurses also monitor a wide array of drugs. Pharmacology, nutrition and diet therapy, and psychology are emphasized in the school's curriculum.

The practice of nursing at Beth Israel includes assessing, diagnosing, and solving human responses to health problems. A nurse can perform some assessment and problem solving without a doctor's assistance; her purview has widened to include educating a patient about a health condition, lending much-needed emotional support and helping the patient grapple with a doctor's diagnosis. Nurses delegate to aides such tasks as bathing patients, walking, ambulating and turning. Because of union contracts, position titles have changed; for instance, aides and auxiliaries today are called "patient care associates"

The composition of classes
has changed, but the
commitment to caring continues

Due to managed care impact, patients are being discharged earlier than before, leading to a growing need for home care. Nurses, who in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved into hospitals in great numbers, today are finding themselves moving away from the hospital to ambulatory care settings, walk in clinics, emergency centers, group homes for the elderly, teenage pregnancy facilities and physician practices. There has been a fundamental shift in the venue of care from the hospital to the community and the home, where nurses are appearing in ever increasing numbers.

Computers play a previously
unimaged role in nurse education

Ironically, as nurses rise in position and education, they have less patient contact, which is a fundamental element of nursing. In the age of computerization, nurses forge ahead learning computer skills and applying them in hospital units, clinics, and medical offices. Those who have comparatively minimal training - the aides, medical technicians and health care associates - spend more time with patients than R.N.s.

As nursing goes through yet another dramatic shift, nurse educators cautiously reserve judgment about the changes that lie ahead. The nursing profession has developed into a stratified model that educators earlier in the century could never have foreseen.

Member of the
Class of 2005