Profiles in Health Care Leadership: Angela Barron McBride, RN, PhD, FAAN
“Leaders must help others learn how to lead.”
Dr. Angela Barron McBride has long viewed mentoring and teaching as a cornerstone of her career—and she has nurtured other nurses as an author, professor, dean, and organizational president. While some might view an academic career as being removed from “real world” clinical practice, Dr. McBride has demonstrated that challenging scholarship is necessary for the profession of nursing to advance—and that the leadership skills honed in academia are also relevant in other organizations.
Dr. McBride’s path in nursing was primarily that of education, research and scholarship. After several years of clinical work, she obtained a BSN from Georgetown University in 1962, when few nursing programs were university-based, and continued to Yale University to earn a master’s degree, with an emphasis in psychiatric nursing. Her work in the field of mental health led Indiana University (IU) to ask her to develop their doctoral program in psychiatric nursing, and she has long-been viewed as a leader in this specialty area.
At IU, she emphasized the importance of finding answers to important clinical questions. “It’s not a real profession if you don’t take steps to develop the knowledge base,” explained Dr. McBride. This commitment has led to a host of leadership positions, including serving as president of Sigma Theta Tau International, the honor society for nursing, and of the American Academy of Nursing, and being elected to the Institute of Medicine. She was named as the first associate dean of research of the IU School of Nursing, and eventually became its dean, retiring from that position in 2003.
Dr. McBride has long been interested in the challenges that women face balancing motherhood and careers, has authored several books exploring the topic. In the early 1980s, she was named a Kellogg National Fellow to study stages of parenthood, which also provided her with an intensive opportunity to learn and develop her leadership skills further—this was an interdisciplinary program, and she was its first nurse. Her commitment to nurturing leadership in nurses has continued more recently as director of the leadership conference that’s part of the John A. Hartford Foundation’s Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Program and as chair of the national advisory committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Nurse Faculty Scholars Program.
She now brings her leadership skills to the hospital boardroom, to Indianapolis-based Clarian Health, where she has served since 2004. Since being appointed chair of the board's Quality and Patient Safety Committee, she has worked to get the board on board in making a public commitment to measure and attain quality improvement. Under McBride's guidance, an analysis was made of Clarian's strengths and weaknesses, and the plan was strengthened to standardize safety practices and “bake in” cultural change. She has worked with the Clarian leadership to put in place concrete quality measures that have resulted in measurable improvements in quality, safety and patient and employee satisfaction.
The chair of Clarian Health’s board, V. William Hunt, noted that, “McBride’s experience as a nurse made her vital in recognizing the need and then shaping the plan for implementing these changes.” He emphasizes that McBride’s leadership is a perfect example of the relationship between nursing, quality care and patient safety—a lesson, he notes, that would serve other health organizations well.
Some of the information in this article originally appeared in Indiana University Magazine, “Florence Nightingale, Meet Angela McBride” by Ellen Gullett, July/August 2003.
