Ida Maria Danzey

Professor

“When I was growing up I was told, ‘the knowledge that you have is the one thing that nobody can take away from you.’”

Ida Danzey, RN has only been teaching at SMC since August 1991. “But I was teaching at the LA County Medical Center School of Nursing for 13 years,” she states. “And after all those years teaching, I see my students everywhere I go, which always makes me feel good.”

Ida reports that her determination to be a nurse “probably began in elementary school when my sister became ill.” Those that tended her sister showed a lot of compassion, a quality that Ida feels is all-important to good nursing. “We’ve become so focused on science in today’s medicine that we’ve forgotten about the ‘caring’ aspects of healing,” she says. “Finding that balance between science and art is what we’re coming back to now. And really caring about the people you’re helping does not make nurses any less professional.”

Ida finds teaching advanced classes in pediatrics no more essential than the class she currently conducts in the Fundamentals of Nursing. “What we do, a lot of people might consider ‘custodial’ kinds of tasks,” she says. “But these simple chores we perform require a lot of knowledge. And the art of bathing someone or giving them the right medication is all part of the same exciting process. When I see my students understand the connection between very basic skills and the more sophisticated aspects of medicine,” she says, “it makes me feel very good about what I’m doing.”

Ida plans a trip to Zimbabwe this summer “to see the stone sculptures of the Shona people. They clearly show the relationship between all living things,” she says. “And understanding these relationships is essential for our personal human development.”

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