Giving students the big picture
From hospice pioneer to inspirational teacher
Corless encourages students' ideas, gives feedback, and provides a big-picture perspective.
(Richard Schultz)FACULTY HONOREE: Inge Corless
For Inge Corless, teaching is an opportunity to share. "This school takes education very seriously," says Corless, who is a professor in the graduate nursing program at Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions. "We make absolutely sure that our students are safe to practice before we send them into the community. But after their training, we find patients teach us so much. And I find I learn so much from my students."
Corless's willingness to listen to both her students and her patients inspired her student, Sheila Davis, to nominate her for this award. "Dr. Corless is sought after as an advisor, project/thesis mentor, and teacher," Davis says. "In her gentle and nurturing manner she enables her students to fulfill their potential and exceed their own expectations."
Nurturing, says Corless, is an integral aspect of teaching. "I think it's very important that we nurture our students. I have two daughters, but my students are my academic children," she says. "The students who come to me in the graduate program at MGH are already first-rate professionals. My job is to encourage them with the formulation of ideas, to give them feedback. Sometimes people don't see possibilities for advancement, but since I have years of experience in the field, I have a perspective on the big picture they may not yet have and can suggest positions and programs and say to them, 'This is something I can see you achieving.'"
Corless's ability to see the big picture goes back to her earliest days as a nurse. "My mother had cancer when I was a youngster and I was taught how to give her injections for pain when I was just 14," she says. "My familiarity with death in my family made me think there ought to be better ways to care for patients at the end of life." After attending a workshop with psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (author of On Death and Dying), Corless teamed with a doctor in Albany, NY, to develop St. Peter's, one of the first hospices in the nation. "Hospice has really been a nursing innovation," she says, "and I think that's because nurses play so many roles. There are psychological, social, spiritual aspects for the patient and the family and the nurse provides guidance and support on all of those levels. Nursing requires both cognitive skills and emotional skills to be helpful. There's never enough compassion."
Corless earned her nursing degree from Bellevue School of Nursing in New York, her master's at Boston University, and her PhD from Brown University. Her compassion for her patients led to a Robert Wood Johnson Scholarship in 1981 at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. "Intellectually, I was curious about what could be co-opting the immune system, but emotionally I was concerned because people were being denied care. As professionals, we have to care for people, and nothing else should matter. I felt the need to teach people, both patients and caregivers, to speak up. That's what nursing is all about."
Corless has been recognized with more than a dozen awards honoring her work as a teacher and role model in AIDS care, palliative care, and hospice. But she is not one to rest on her laurels. In 2000, after attending an international meeting on AIDS, she headed to South Africa and worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Natal's School of Nursing. Corless returned to South Africa in 2005, taking a group of her students with her.
"One of the best things about being a teacher is that you get to see your students accomplish great things," Corless says. "I've gotten involved in a project in South Africa co-founded by one of my students, Sheila Davis. It's a feeding project for AIDS orphans. So you see, my student is leading the way and giving me the chance to contribute."
