Cathy Young earns Alumni Achievement Award

Cathy Young (MSN ’92) has spent her career opening doors to health care for the vulnerable. Young, an associate professor at Texas Christian University, has served as president of the Northeast Arkansas Nurse Practitioner Association. In 2015, she was one of 168 leaders to be inducted into the American Academy of Nursing.

Young’s impact in her field led to her selection as the 2016 Alumni Achievement Award from the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Each year, the UMKC Alumni Association recognizes 16 alumni and one family with top honors. UMKC will honor Young and other outstanding alumni at the 2016 Alumni Awards Luncheon April 21 at Swinney Recreation Center. The luncheon is one of the university’s largest events, and proceeds support student scholarships. Last year’s luncheon attracted nearly 600 attendees and garnered more than $141,000 in student scholarships.

“I teach nursing, and I believe I am making a difference,” Young said. In her research, Young studies the impact of smell as a trigger for PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, on veterans returning from combat.

Much earlier in her career, Young created a family nurse practitioner program at Southeast Missouri State University, a task she says is near and dear to her as a longtime resident. There were and still are many challenges in providing health care for residents living in the region including extreme poverty, substance abuse and lack of access to care. Young, then teaching at the University of Missouri-Columbia, worked on a federal grant with a Southeast Missouri State professor who had the philosophy of “grow your own.” Young went on to teach there, and today the nurse practitioner program continues to produce needed health professionals, with more than 90 percent of the graduates remaining in southeast Missouri to provide health care to the underserved.

Young also worked with children in southeast Missouri who had been sexually assaulted, and she served at a child advocacy center. During her first year of practice in a rural Missouri health clinic, she found the closest services for children were in St. Louis and Columbia. She worked with another nurse practitioner and physician to provide physical examinations for children.

“The number of children we were seeing were many more than we expected,” Young said. “The courts and the community noticed the service we were providing with no financial support, and they rallied, sought donations and supplies. The child advocacy center is still serving children in southeast Missouri and has provided care in more than 3,000 cases.”

Young became a nurse by accident. She went to an unemployment office to take an exam to be a census worker. She was sent to the wrong room, took a nursing program exam and received a call from the nursing school. They said they had her test scores but did not have an application. They asked her to come talk to them. Today, she holds a doctor of Nursing Science degree.

“I am a first-generation college graduate and the only one in my family to complete a doctorate,” Young said. “I learned recently I was the only one from my high school senior class to be awarded a doctoral degree — lots of great opportunities became possible with the degree.”

It was a master’s degree that led Young to UMKC. She was teaching in an associate degree program in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and one of the requirements for the position was a master’s. However, there weren’t many opportunities for graduate education in nursing in the region. UMKC offered an outreach program in St. Louis.

Through UMKC, Young discovered the benefits of research. She reviewed charts of transplant patients alongside an Oxford, England, physician who was researching early clinical signs of organ rejection.

“I saw the impact that research could have on people’s lives,” she said. “It changed my whole perspective.”

Young, a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, loves her profession.

“If you choose to be a nurse, do what you love,” she said. “Nursing has opportunities in the hospital, clinics, community health, research, teaching, service.”

Click here for tickets or sponsorship information for the April 21, 2016, Alumni Awards Luncheon.

Click here for more information on the 2016 Alumni Awards recipients.