Built To Serve, Encourage and Care: Meet Kadia Scott FNP ’26
For Kadia Scott FNP ‘26, the call to work in healthcare came early. When Scott was a child in her hometown of Saint Mary, Jamaica, her great-grandmother suffered a stroke that left her right side severely weakened. Suddenly doing the things she loved – from spending time with her neighbors to working on her family’s farm to worshipping at her church – became difficult. However, what struck Scott most about this period of her great-grandmother’s life was the care she received from numerous doctors, nurses and social workers, each one committed to her well-being. These professionals inspired her to embark on her own career in healthcare.
Today Scott is a nurse at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, where she has worked for nearly five years, spending time in both family care and acute care. It is a demanding, absorbing vocation, but she would not have it any other way. Not only does she play a pivotal role in treating her patients, but she also teaches them about their health and well-being, and advocates on their behalf. It is work that Scott calls “wonderful, amazing and full of surprises.”
I was built to serve, encourage and to care for others.”
Scott believes in taking a thoughtful, holistic approach to care. That is part of what drew her to Le Moyne’s Family Nurse Practitioner Program. She wanted to learn from professors who brought their own experiences in the exam room into the classroom, and who took the time to come to know their students not just as clinicians, but as individuals. What’s more, she appreciated the ways in which those professors modeled the empathy that lies at the heart of healthcare.
The Le Moyne graduate also benefited from the College’s Healthcare Opportunities for Professional and Educational Success (HOPES) program. Funded by the New York State Department of Health, HOPES addresses barriers that can accompany advanced healthcare training, including financial, academic, cultural, and logistical challenges, so that students are better positioned to persist, graduate and enter professional practice. In Scott’s case HOPES provided her with space to focus on the two most important things: her patients and her studies.
There is much more ahead for this clinician. She will soon embark on the next step in her professional journey when she begins an acute care fellowship at SUNY Upstate Medical Center. It will allow her to deepen her expertise in managing patients with acute, complex medical needs at a time when Central New York urgently needs more advanced care providers. As she looks to the future, she is eager to continue to grow her capacity to serve her patients and her community.
God says that we are supposed to treat our neighbor as ourself, and our neighbor is anyone we encounter. I think about that at the hospital a lot. Regardless of what is going on around us, we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
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Kadia’s story is part of a series of stories on medical professionals who care for and serve our community thanks in part to the Healthcare Opportunities for Professional and Educational Success (HOPES) program. HOPES is made possible thanks to a $5 million, five-year grant from the New York State Department of Health’s Healthcare Education and Life-skills Program.
