Nursing Sills Grayce Sills and Nursing Leadership

Brief Biography:

Grayce Sills dedicated her life's work to improving conditions for psychiatric health patients, both through reforms in the area of psychiatric nursing and through education of future generations of nurses. During the era succeeding World War II, the psychiatric nursing profession was making its first forays into mainstream treatment orientation. Grayce Sills would emerge into the profession during this time and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, would observe that the conditions to which psychiatric patients were often treated at this juncture were abhorrent, inhumane and inconsistent with the standards otherwise sought in general patient treatment. As a student of Hildegard Peplau, whom she refers to as the mother of psychiatric nursing, Sills would come to appreciate the need for greater demonstration of caring and compassion in this subsection of the nursing profession. (Barker, p. 79) Earning a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Dayton and an M.S. And Ph.D. At Ohio State, she would go on to serve as an assistant professor beginning in 1964. Sills would advance through the Ohio State system as a full-time professor and an administrative director, finally retiring in 1991 while serving as the director or chair of numbers programs within the school. (Murray, p. 1)

Contributions to Nursing:

The result would be an enormous contribution to the field in the form of the education...

In particular, it would be Sills' ambition to bring a greater attention to the humanitarian implications of psychiatric nursing, developing a curriculum which would dispatch future generations of psychiatric nurses with greater empathy, sensitivity and attentiveness to the treatment of patients suffering with mental illness. And to Sills, it was important that this disposition be implanted in students as a permanent compass for treatment approaches. According to Fitzpatrick et al. (2010), Sills would excel as an educator of future nurses because of her concerted emphasis on measuring sustainable outcomes. Accordingly, Fitzpatrick et al. indicate that Sills believed "that the most important outcome measures of student learning are those that are long-term, and that faculty and students should be as concerned with these as with the short-term outcomes." (Fitzpatrick et al., p. 19)
This emphasis on long-term outcomes would pair appropriately with her ambition for mainstream integration of the goals of psychiatric nursing. As Yaeger (2008) reports, central among Sills' contributions would be her emphasis on normalizing mental health support amongst nursing staffs. In addition to bringing a greater humanitarian focus to the treatment of psychiatric patients, Sills would make the case both to her students and in her practice that it was now necessary to find ways to integrate effective mental health support with traditional modes of medial…