Nursing School taps D.C. for grad dean

After seven years as the top nurse in the federal government, Marla Salmon recently examined the factors that brought her to Washington and decided they were no longer enough to keep her there. The government's loss became the University's gain when Salmon began her tenure as the Nursing School's associate dean and director of graduate studies September 15. Salmon -- who chaired the nursing programs at the universities of Minnesota and North Carolina at Chapel Hill before becoming director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Division of Nursing in 1991 -- said she was approached by "several other prominent institutions," but chose to come to Penn because it shares her commitment to social responsibility. "Penn hasn't forgotten that it has a social mission, and that is the foundation of what an educational institution needs to do," she said. In her new role, Salmon said she hopes to help mold nurses capable of "meeting the challenges facing heath care in the next century" by creating more interdisciplinary programs and courses examining health care in other parts of the world. "The role nurses have traditionally played as advocates for patients will be increasingly difficult in an era where health care decisions are driven by cost constraints," she said. Although the major issue facing health care providers is whether medical treatment is a universal right or should be limited only to those who can afford it, Salmon said "nurses have their ethical basis on the notion that everyone is entitled to adequate health care." Salmon's personal commitment to socially responsible medicine has its roots in her childhood. Growing up in the small northern California town of Sebastopol, where her father was a general practitioner and her mother worked as a nurse in his office, she was "surrounded by caring." "My father was the kind of old-time doctor who would accept payment in fish, fruit or grateful thanks," she said. "Nobody ever left his office without being cared for." Such an upbringing led Salmon to study nursing and political science at the University of Portland in Oregon, where she "rebelled" by protesting against the Vietnam War and wearing pants to formal university functions. If priests could wear dresses, she would say, women could wear pants. Salmon went on to earn a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship and a doctorate in nursing from Johns Hopkins University. After teaching at Minnesota and UNC, she left the academic world to work at the government's Health and Human Services headquarters in Rockville, Md. "I was influenced by my parents' commitment to making sure everyone got adequate health care," she said. "My background in nursing and political science led me to public health policy." As the head of a federal department with a $60 million annual budget, Salmon sought to increase nurses' involvement in determining government health care policy and served on First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care task force. She also worked to ensure an adequate supply of qualified nursing personnel. Additionally, Salmon helped create a $400,000 federal program to provide health services to migrant workers and their families, an initiative she said was particularly important to her because her family used to go out in the fields with migrant workers. "My parents taught me not to judge people by how much they made or what they wore, and they gave me a strong sense of social justice," Salmon said. "I learned that you will never meet a harder-working group of people than migrant workers."