Chapter 19: A History of Nursing at MD Anderson
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Summers sketches the history of nursing at MD Anderson, beginning with the work of Renilda Hilkemeyer (interviewed for OHP). She discusses the contributions of former Nursing directors Joyce Alt and John Crosley, who led MD Anderson to its first Magnet designation.
Identifier
SummersB_03_20140429_C19
Publication Date
4-29-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Barbara Summers, PhD, Oral History Interview, April 29, 2014
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - OverviewMD Anderson History Portraits Giving Recognition
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Would you like to speak more generally about the Division of Nursing now, kind of an overview of the history of the division since you took over?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Well, I think I can just talk about my understanding of the history of nursing at MD Anderson, which is the Division of Nursing, and that is that when MD Anderson became an official cancer hospital, the first chief of nursing was Renilda Hilkemeyer [Oral History Interview], and Mrs. Hilkemeyer, who passed away a couple of years ago, was one of the founders of oncology nursing as a specialty practice. And MD Anderson was just so fortunate to have her as the first chief nurse in the organization. Of course, the organization was quite a bit smaller at the time, so she was a very hands-on leader in terms of she did the hiring of the nurses and she hired the nurse managers, etc. But, you know, that was a time when we had maybe a couple hundred nurses at most. But what she did was to establish for the organization the value of nursing care to our patients and to be able to have a relationship with the president of the organization and the physicians within the organization that continually emphasize the important contributions of nurses and nursing. Mrs. Hilkemeyer also had a reputation for defending nursing and defending nurses and being a very strong advocate for nurses and for nursing practice. So she was the founder of modern oncology nursing in general, and then she was really the founder of nursing practice here at MD Anderson. And then when Mrs. Hilkemeyer stepped down from her position, Joyce Alt became the chief nursing officer. This is all before my time here. Mrs. Alt, I think, was very helpful to the nursing profession in promulgating the role of the advanced practice nurse at the time, which was the clinical nurse specialist, and really focusing on elevating the practice of professional nursing within the organization, hiring very talented and highly educated nurses into leadership and management positions. So she took the work that Mrs. Hilkemeyer had done and then brought it up to the next level. And then following Mrs. Alt, Dr. John Crossley was the chief nursing officer, and he became chief nursing officer just prior to my arrival at MD Anderson in 1997. I think he arrived in ’95 or ’96. And Dr. Crossley brought, number one, an additional focus for nursing leaders on the stewardship of our financial resources, so ensuring that our frontline nursing leaders had the skills and understood their responsibility for managing human resources, fiscal resources. He was also responsible for the development of our first Professional Development Model, called the PDM, which was a model that recognized that nurses develop as practitioners from novice to expert over a period of time. So he led a team that developed this structure called the PDM, where nurses would be hired in as novice and would advance along that continuum to advance, beginner, competent maturation and would meet specific performance criteria at each one of the levels. And that was really the first time we had a robust Professional Development Model. Prior to that, there had been something called a clinical ladder, which was more commonly found in other hospitals where you could be a Clinical Nurse I or a Clinical Nurse II or a Clinical Nurse III, but those were not really designed in the same way to highlight the development of professional capacities. So Dr. Crossley did a very nice job with that. And he also led the organization to the first Magnet designation, which was a major step, and MD Anderson was, and is, a member of the Magnet Charter Hospitals, so we were one of the first fifty hospitals in the country to become Magnet designated. So he made those very important contributions to nursing practice at MD Anderson. Chapter 20
Recommended Citation
Summers, Barbara PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 19: A History of Nursing at MD Anderson" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1256.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1256
Conditions Governing Access
Open
