Nursing Practice and Health Care

Mary A. Gergis

Designation: Asst. Professor

Department: Critical Care

Institution: Towson University

Country: United States

Dr. Mary has completed her master and PhD in critical care nursing, then joined the University of Maryland School of Nursing for a 2-years postdoctoral fellowship in palliative care and end-of-life care where I worked in several research projects with my mentor, Dr. Debra Wiegand, who is internationally recognized for her work in Palliative and End-of-Life Care research in the intensive care units.

Before coming to Towson University, she worked as an assistant professor at Alexandria University for 12 years where she taught critical care and emergency nursing to undergraduate and graduate students. As a critical care nursing faculty, she have spent much time with my students in critical care units where she was deeply touched with the suffering of critically ill patients and their families which made her develop a passion for integrating palliative care in the intensive Care Units. So, her teaching philosophy is to be grounded in the ethic of caring. She believe that teaching excellence in nursing education encompasses not only the knowledge of the discipline and pedagogical skills but also the scholar's ability to value and transcend caring within the curricula and role modeling caring in the classroom, clinical setting and in the virtual learning environment.

Her research focuses on the integration of palliative care in intensive care units through establishing educational programs to help ICU physicians and nurses gain the knowledge and understand how to integrate palliative care into their day-to-day practice. She also focus on research devising new strategies for the effective teaching of caring, communication, palliative care and end of life care to health care students and developing interventions that empower nurses to provide quality palliative and end-of-life care to their patients.