You are reading the last issue of This Week, the weekly paper for the Medical Center that has been in continuous publication for at least 43 years. On Jan. 5, 2009, a new paper with a new name, published every two weeks, will take its place.

This Week has undergone many changes during the years, but for most of those years, it was a one-page publication, printed front and back, with the schedule of meetings and lectures, brief news items and faculty and staff kudos.

In the early 1990s, the publication began to take on the look of a newsletter in black and white with notebook-paper-size pages with small columns and a red flag.

The year 1995

Berry Allison suffered for 10 years the pain that mental illness ignites within a family, the pitfalls of a patchwork care and insurance system and the indignities of stigma.

After watching her daughter suffer a mental illness that robbed the young woman of community support, broke friendships, tore apart her marital family and strained her extended family’s finances, Allison is speaking out in a new way.

Allison, a Tallahatchie County resident and member of Mississippi’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, has traveled the country giving talks on awareness, but now she’s a member of a nascent group that plans to improve Mississippi’s mental health care infrastructure.

That group, informally begun at a symposium on mental

The Mississippi woods will be full of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) this fall, and even more will join them after Christmas with both adults and children trying out their new rides.

Frances Spinosa, a neurosurgery nurse at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, appreciates the appeal of ATVs, but she’s helped treat enough people injured by them to make her wary.

“People have a mindset about ATVs — that it’s somehow safe to ride them without helmets,” she said.

Dr. Christopher Blewett, chief of pediatric surgery at the Medical Center, says most long-term injuries could be avoided if ATV users wore helmets.

“It’s the same thing I tell people about seat belts. Most of what you can injure while wearing a seat belt can be fixed. Head injuries are much harder to fix.”

Research now being done by nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center has the potential to positively impact the state, the nation and the world.

And according to Dr. Ada Sue Hinshaw, dean of the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., nurses have the specific skills required to move their research into effective health policy.

Hinshaw’s presentation, “Shaping Health Policy Through Nursing Research,” was the keynote address for the joint Christine L. Oglevee Papers Day and Sigma Theta Tau Founders’ Day Nov. 14 in the Norman C. Nelson Student Union. The event culminated the School of Nursing’s 60th Anniversary Celebration in which nursing alumni, faculty and students paid homage to the leaders who shaped the school’s history and considered the promise of the school’s vast future.