Three alumnae of the Graduate School of Nursing were honored by the UMass Memorial Nurse Practitioner Council to celebrate National Nurse Practitioner Week.
Mary Sullivan, DNP, received the Leadership Award, and Vinetta McCann, DNP, and Diane Carter, MS, were named Nurse Practitioner Exemplars at a ceremony jointly hosted by the GSN and UMass Memorial on Nov. 21. In addition to their clinical practices, Drs. Sullivan and McCann are also assistant professors of nursing at the GSN.
Sullivan is an oncological nurse practitioner and one of four graduates in the GSN’s Doctor of Nursing Practice inaugural class of 2010. She is actively involved with clinical trials management as well as clinical care for pancreatic and gastrointestinal cancer patients, and in the organization of the UMass prospective gastrointestinal tumors databases. She was previously honored with a Champions of Excellence Award for her devotion to patients with cancer.
“Mary is one of the best health care professionals I have ever had the pleasure of working with,” wrote Giles Whelan, MD, professor of surgery and interim director of the UMass Cancer Center of Excellence, in Sullivan’s nomination.
Also a graduate of the GSN’s DNP class of 2010, McCann evaluates pre- and post-operative patients in the Department of Surgery, and works with patients in the Department of Gastroenterology. McCann’s nominator, Associate Professor of Medicine and Surgery Dominic Nompleggi, MD, PhD, wrote that “she has become the ‘gold standard’ by which we measure everything related to nursing practice.”
Carter, who earned her master’s of nursing at the GSN in 2001, is a nurse educator for the UMass Diabetes Center of Excellence. “She is loved by her patients, respected by her colleagues, admired by staff at our clinic and trusted by her superiors,” wrote Samir Malkani, MD, associate clinical professor of medicine, who nominated Carter.
