As I write this editorial, I am preparing to attend a special event that is a palliative care conference being held in New York in recognition of the career achievements of Nessa Coyle, RN, PhD, FAAN, from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Nessa is retiring after a 40-year career at Memorial but will continue as a volunteer providing ethics consultation and mentoring nurses in the communication lab.
It strikes me as such a brilliant thing that this conference is being held as a tribute to Nessa, as we so often do not celebrate our heroes and their career achievements, but such a festivity is so fitting for Nessa, who is a pioneer in palliative nursing.
Nessa began with the supportive care program in 1981, long before palliative care was known in hospitals and when hospice was early in its development. She devoted years to mentoring the first pain specialists and earliest palliative care physicians, nurses, social workers, and chaplains. The palliative care conference in her honor will include faculty across many disciplines, many of whom are national leaders in the field, who were first inspired by Nessa.
Nessa is known as the ultimate clinician scholar. She has maintained an active clinical practice, doing inpatient consults, home visits and, telephone support while creating an admirable body of scholarly work, research, and publications in areas such as suffering, final hours, conscious sedation, intractable pain, and bereavement.
I have come to know and love Nessa over the past 25 years. She has traveled the world, fearlessly visiting remote villages in underdeveloped countries, doing home visits in slums, in intensely challenging situations while supporting nurses to break down cultural barriers to care and always, always maintaining the focus on the patient's goals of care.
Nessa has been the "detail" in our Oxford Textbook of Palliative Nursing, ensuring that the content was clinically accurate and complete.1 She was the passion behind our work in defining the nature of suffering from the perspective of nursing.2 Her own qualitative research addresses the "existential slap" as patients confront the reality of a terminal illness.3 Nessa always seeks to understand the patient view, as in her thoughtful scholarship related to patients who would seek assisted death.4 Nessa lifted up the profession of palliative nursing, always modeling deep compassion, attention to pain and symptoms, and recognition of spiritual and psychological needs.
Thank you Nessa. You created a model for palliative care nursing, pioneered that role in an interdisciplinary team, taught us all how to see patients as whole people, and spoke eloquently about the compassion fatigue of nurses and need for self-care and reflection. You brought great meaning to the work now known as palliative nursing. And you did it all in your humble, graceful, and detailed way so that many people who never knew you know very well your voice and its impact on our evolving field.
One of my physician colleagues and also someone I admire greatly, Dr Michael Rabow, shared with me recently a beautiful quote, from an anonymous author, "I have drunk from wells I did not dig." Nessa, the community of palliative nursing drinks from the wells you have dug, and we are so grateful.
Betty Ferrell, PhD, MA, FAAN, FPCN, CHPN
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]
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