Claire M. Fagin, Highly effective Advocate for Nurses and Nursing, Dies at 97

Claire M. Fagin, a number one professional on, advocate for and alter agent within the occupation of nursing, and one of many first ladies to guide an Ivy League college, the College of Pennsylvania, died on Tuesday at her dwelling in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her demise was confirmed by her son and solely fast survivor, Charles.

Amongst different achievements, Dr. Fagin was broadly credited with overturning the frequent follow of strictly limiting parental visits to hospitalized kids. She was impressed (and infuriated) by what occurred within the early Nineteen Sixties when she and her husband had been visiting their younger son Joshua, hospitalized for hernia surgical procedure: They had been ordered out of the hospital.

So when she earned her doctorate in nursing from New York College in 1964, she made the follow of limiting visits the topic of her dissertation analysis. Her findings that the follow was dangerous drew broad consideration — she was interviewed on tv about it — and so they ignited a change in medical care.

“She was the one who cracked that,” mentioned Linda H. Aiken, a professor on the College of Pennsylvania Faculty of Nursing, the place Dr. Fagin was named dean in 1977.

Dr. Fagin reworked the college — tripling its enrollment, establishing a doctoral program in nursing and constructing Penn right into a broadly acknowledged world chief in nursing analysis and schooling. In 2006, Penn renamed its Nursing Schooling Constructing the Claire M. Fagin Nursing Sciences Constructing.

“It’s actually arduous to determine anybody who has had a bigger affect on nursing than Claire,” Dr. Aiken mentioned.

In 1993, when Penn’s president, Sheldon Hackney, left to change into chairman of the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Fagin changed him as interim president, a put up she held till 1994. (She is commonly credited as the primary lady to function president of an Ivy League college, though Hanna Holborn Grey was appearing president of Yale from Could 1977 to June 1978.)

Dr. Fagin was later the founding director of the John A. Hartford Basis’s nationwide program on geriatric nursing. She was additionally chairwoman of the advisory board that turned a $100 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Basis into the Betty Irene Moore Faculty of Nursing on the College of California, Davis, which focuses on grasp’s and doctoral applications in nursing.

All of the whereas, she labored to win nurses the skilled respect she felt they didn’t at all times obtain and the autonomy they wanted to work in new methods — for instance, as nurse practitioners or researchers. She additionally advocated for baccalaureate applications for the coaching of registered nurses, versus the once-common two-year hospital-based or affiliate diploma coaching applications.

In an interview for this obituary in 2003, Dr. Fagin mentioned, “It’s unhealthy for nursing while you can’t differentiate skilled nurses from individuals who go to high school for 2 years.” (In keeping with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a bachelor’s diploma is now the “typical” entry-level requirement for registered nurses.)

Earlier than becoming a member of Penn, Dr. Fagin was chairwoman of the nursing division at Lehman School of the Metropolis College of New York and director of its Well being Professions Institute, in addition to director of graduate applications in psychiatric nursing within the division of nurse schooling at New York College. When the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being established a scientific analysis facility in 1953, she was its first director of youngsters’s applications.She was a member of the Nationwide Academy of Drugs.

Claire Muriel Mintzer was born in Manhattan on Nov. 25, 1926, to Harry Mintzer, an immigrant from Russia, and Mae (Slatin) Mintzer, who was from Poland. She grew up within the College Heights part of the Bronx, the place her dad and mom had a grocery retailer.

She entered Hunter School at 16; over the objections of her dad and mom, who hoped she would emulate an aunt and change into a doctor, she enrolled after one semester in Wagner School on Staten Island, which she selected as a result of it had simply established a bachelor’s diploma program in nursing.

Her dad and mom opposed her determination, till her aunt identified that she may at all times enroll in medical faculty after she earned her diploma.

However medical faculty was not one thing she wished, she mentioned within the interview. She was impressed as a substitute, she mentioned, by the thought of wartime nursing service. And, she added, not completely jokingly, she admired the glamorous blue capes, lined with purple, worn by members of the Military Nurse Corps.

By the point she earned her nursing diploma, in 1948, she had already begun working at Seaview Hospital on Staten Island, which was then a tuberculosis hospital. Her work with kids there grew right into a lifelong curiosity within the psychiatric issues of youngsters, and in psychiatric nursing normally. From there she went to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, the place she labored with emotionally disturbed adolescents.

After incomes a grasp’s diploma in psychiatric nursing at Columbia College in 1951, Dr. Fagin joined the pediatric psychiatry workers on the Scientific Heart on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being in Bethesda, Md.

Whereas she was working there, she met Samuel L. Fagin, a mathematician and electrical engineer, and so they married in 1952. He died in 2019 at 96. Their son Joshua died of Covid in 2020 at 62.

Properly into her 90s, Dr. Fagin continued to jot down and communicate concerning the significance of the nursing occupation, in addition to its issues and methods to handle them. In 2022, when there was widespread concern concerning the Covid-related burnout of well being care employees, notably hospital nurses, she and Dr. Aiken printed an evaluation in STAT, an internet journal protecting well being, science and drugs, suggesting that the true reason for burnout was insufficient hospital staffing, which they mentioned Medicare may repair by elevating present hospital staffing necessities.

At Dr. Fagin’s demise, she and Dr. Aiken had been at work on higher methods to encourage nurses, physicians and different well being care employees to talk as one on issues of public well being.

Nursing is “a renaissance calling,” Dr. Fagin maintained. “Therapeutic is an artwork. You might be utilizing a science to carry out an artwork.”

Despite her superior levels, her distinguished tutorial positions and honorary levels and different awards, Dr. Fagin at all times made some extent of figuring out herself as a nurse — a follow, she recalled, that didn’t sit properly together with her mom. Citing her different {qualifications} and the roles she held, her mom would say that her daughter was not, as she put it, “an actual nurse.”

“I’d say, ‘Mama, I’m an R.N.’” Dr. Fagin mentioned. “That’s what it means — Actual Nurse.”

Cornelia Dean is a science author and former science editor of The New York Instances. Her newest ebook is “Making Sense of Science.”