Carol Durham retires after 45 years at nursing school
The innovative educator and clinician helped advance the school’s curriculum with groundbreaking advances in simulation.
Carol Durham came to UNC in 1980, “so I could become a Carolina nurse,” she said. At the close of 2025, the innovative educator and clinician, generous mentor and changemaker whose vision has helped shape the UNC School of Nursing, retired after 45 years at the school. For her commitment to service and community engagement, the UNC Board of Governors honored her with the 2025 Gov. James E. Holshouser Jr. Award for Excellence in Public Service in February.
“This has been the most amazing career, and it’s because I’ve had students who come in wanting to be a good nurse, and I’ve been alongside them helping them accomplish that,” said Durham. “It’s one of the biggest privileges you could ever have, to help someone know what to do, and then watch them go out and make a difference in someone’s life.”
‘It might as well be me’
Durham was raised in the small community of Rockfish, North Carolina, and when she applied to college, her mother suggested she put her hometown as the nearby Raeford, where she attended high school. Nobody knew where Rockfish was, she told her.
“I said somebody has to put it on the map,” says Durham. “It might as well be me.”
She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Western Carolina University and in 1980 enrolled at Carolina for her Master of Science in Nursing where she started working in the skills lab — a move that would change her life and the course of the school. Investing in the skill acquisition of students became her passion, and over the next few decades, she would help advance the school’s curriculum with groundbreaking advances in simulation.
Durham was a professor and director of Education-Innovation-Simulation Learning Environment, where students acquire, practice and gain confidence in vital patient care skills before entering clinical practice.
In the 2000s, she convinced the school to invest in its first human patient simulator — a standard manikin called Stan the Man. Simulating a clinical experience that students can learn from takes an ever-evolving set of methodologies and tools, from practicing injections on a pad, to suctioning a tracheotomy on a manikin to applying skills safely amid interprofessional collaboration or a chaotic situation.
(Submitted photo)
Training Carolina nurses
In 2010, Durham became the patient in need of those quick, life-saving nursing skills. Each year, Durham repeats the remarkable story of recognizing her own symptoms of sepsis and being treated in the UNC Hospitals emergency department for her students in the skills lab, hoping her story can save lives.
“I always say that when I looked up and saw a Carolina nurse, I was relieved, because I knew how they were trained, and I’m confident in the way that we train,” Durham said. “If you’re an educator, you need to be that confident in the training that you’re providing, right? Because we will be their patients someday.”
One of Durham’s biggest contributions has been moving the school forward, in every way.
“The thing is, we have to keep innovating and staying ahead of the curve. We have to forecast: What will the new nurse in the next generation need? And how can we prepare them for that?” she said. “So that ability to be innovative and creative, and not to be constrained, that opportunity has been a real gift in my career.”
