[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 31 (Monday, March 1, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E300]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO VERNICE D. FERGUSON

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, March 1, 1999

  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask my colleagues to join me 
in paying tribute to a model of excellence, Ms. Vernice D. Ferguson. 
Vernice Ferguson was a Senior Fellow in the School of Nursing at the 
University of Pennsylvania holding the Fagin Family Chair in Cultural 
Diversity. She is immediate Past President of the International Society 
of Nurses in Cancer Care.
  For more than twenty years she served as a top nurse executive at two 
VA Medical Centers affiliated with academic health science centers in 
Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois. For twelve years, she was the 
nurse leader for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest 
organized nursing service in the world with more than 60,000 nursing 
personnel. Prior to the VA assignment, she served as the Chief, Nursing 
Department of the Clinical Center, the National Institutes of Health.
  Ms. Ferguson is a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing of the 
United Kingdom, the second American nurse so honored, and is a Fellow 
of the American Academy of Nursing and Past President. She is Past 
President of Sigma Theta Tau, nursing's international honor society, 
and served as Chair of the Friends of the Virginia Henderson Library 
Advisory Committee.
  Her awards and honors are numerous, including seven honorary 
doctorates. She was the recipient of two fellowships, one in physics at 
the University of Maryland and the other in alcohol studies at Yale 
University. She was a scholar-in-residence at the Catholic University 
of America. Ms. Ferguson was also the Potter-Brinton Distinguished 
Professor for 1994 at the School of Nursing at the University of 
Missouri at Columbia. In 1995, Ms. Ferguson spent nine weeks in South 
Africa where she served as Visiting Associate Professor in the 
Department of Nursing Science at the University of the North West.
  While in South Africa, in her capacity as President of the 
International Society of Nurses in Cancer Care, she toured the country 
extensively, meeting with health care providers in university nursing 
programs, voluntary associations, hospitals, and homes in townships and 
squatters camps. She conducted workshops and offered presentations in a 
variety of settings throughout South Africa.
  Ms. Ferguson serves on the Board of Directors of the Bon Secours 
Health Care System, The Washington Home, the Board of Visitors, Indiana 
University School of Nursing, and the National Institutes of Health 
Alumni Association.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that each Member join me in this tribute to 
Vernice D. Ferguson.

                          ____________________