Emily Jones knew since before she started nursing school that she wanted to take care of babies.

“In my heart, that had never been a question,” said Jones, a Madison resident and patient transport nurse at Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants and Batson Children's Hospital. “As soon as I graduated from nursing school, I wanted to start in the NICU and work with the babies. Once I started working there, I was hungry to know more.”

Now nurses who have a heart for the most vulnerable patients and are “hungry to know more” once again have access to advanced nursing education within the University of Mississippi Medical Center. The University of Mississippi School of Nursing has added pediatric nurse practitioner and neonatal nurse practitioner to the list of Master of Science in Nursing tracks available to prospective students.

Robbie Hughes recently made a generous gift to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, specifically to the Children's of Mississippi $100 million capital campaign.

In early 2015, Hughes and her late husband Dudley made a gift of $2 million to endow the faculty chair for the Memory Impairment and Neurodegenerative Dementia (MIND) Center, a cause near to their hearts since Dudley suffered from dementia. Hughes has requested the amount of the gift to The Campaign for Children's of Mississippi be kept confidential.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Mississippi Medicine, the semi-annual alumni magazine for the School of Medicine. A PDF of that issue can be found here.

Dr. Mark Meeks knows there aren't enough doctors like him, because there are too many patients like his - geriatric patients dealing with pressure ulcers, incontinence, osteoporosis, limited mobility, Alzheimer's disease.

The number and scope of these cases is only going to grow, the byproduct of a population whose age is showing, said Meeks, professor of medicine and director of the UMMC Division of Geriatrics.

In Mississippi alone, within this group, well over 100,000 have been labeled “vulnerable.”

By one estimate, the state could use a geriatrician for every 700 of these adults - usually defined as those 65 and older. It has one for every 5,000.

“There will never be enough geriatricians in the country or the state,” Meeks said, “unless something dramatically changes.”

The Medical Center is proud to announce the following addition to its faculty and leadership staff.

A Children's of Mississippi clinic director receives a statewide resolution while School of Dentistry faculty and staff are selected for various national and regional accolades.