Description
WCCs typically address the issue of medical ethics and praise rising students for their success in completing the basic science portion of medicine, optometry, dentistry, chiropractic, podiatry, pharmacy, physical therapy, physician assistant, advanced practice nursing (Nurse Practitioner, Nurse anesthetist, Clinical nurse specialist, Nurse midwife). A reading of the Hippocratic Oath is common, and family and friends are typically invited.
Over 100 medical schools in the USA now have a WCC, and many students now consider it a rite of passage in the journey toward a healthcare career. Some schools also use this as a graduation from the entire program as well. For example, Moreno Valley College has a White Coat Ceremony for the Physician Assistant students at the end of their final term, where the short coats are discarded and long coats are given as a symbol of being equal clinicians to others who have earned the long coats.
According to some, WCCs have taken on a quasi-religious significance, that symbolizes a "conversion" of a lay person into a member of the healthcare profession and is similar to a priest's ordination to priesthood.
Read more about this topic: White Coat Ceremony
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It is possible—indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic—to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)