Meet Mary Rita Hurley, RN, MPA
Ageing Initiatives Director at the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International 

I was running an ICU in Florida when a friend came to me and said, “There’s a nursing home down the street that just opened this thing, called a sub acute center. And they’re looking for somebody to run it. I think you’d be great at it.” I’m like, “A nursing home--are you kidding me? I’m not stepping foot in there. And what’s a sub acute?”

I checked it out, and I thought, this is so cool. In my career, people would come to the ICU, and if they weren’t well enough, there was nowhere for them to go. This sub acute center became the “tweener,” which is what I called it. It was where people could go until they were either rehabbed or we could find some other kind of placement for them. My whole 30-year nursing career has been spent in adult medicine/med-surg.

I grew up in an extended Italian family with quite a few elders. My mom had four aunts—the little Italian sisters. None of them was married, and three lived together. They all lived a long time and each died within a year and a half to two years of each other because they were a unit. Because I grew up loving these great-aunts, I had a respect and a love for old people; it was a natural thing for me. My passion is gero; I love old people. My friends will tell you that really I’m an old soul … and I’m a little old lady anyway. If I could eat dinner at 5:00 every night and be in bed by 9:00, I’d be happy. A lot of it has to do with my personality and the way I was brought up in that extended family. I grew up being around healthy, aging people.

I ended up in the long-term care rehab side in the operation of nursing homes. I was director of operations in Milwaukee for the third-largest nursing home chain in the country. There were 12 nursing homes in and around Milwaukee with assisted living centers attached to them. I started out at one facility and eventually progressed to the state level.

From the state level I took a job with people I knew from my rehab days at what is now Beverly Enterprises. They offered me a job being a national director. I trained people all over the country on how to use five pieces of Nautilus equipment specifically designed for the elderly. The seats were lower; they had more “cush;” they were hydraulic. It was a different modality for physical therapy to use. Instead of putting them on the floor and using Therabands, they were using high-end, beautiful equipment. The oldest person I ever had on this equipment was 95 years old. Everybody was flipping out, “Oh, you’re going to hurt them.” But, it’s all about strength training.

Because Beverly Enterprises was in 40 states, I was running all over the country. They sold their rehab services to nursing homes. I trained the nursing home staff on how to use the equipment. I loved the job. They needed someone to run operations, so I was asked to run the West Coast Division. It was eight states, 225 nursing homes and 350 employees, with a $35 million budget. I was hired as the interim region vice president and did that for almost three years and earned a lot of frequent-flyer miles.

I loved it, but it was exhausting. I couldn’t do it anymore. I left in 2004 and took eight months off—my mid-life pause. I started the Hurley Group, LLC. I worked at that for awhile giving out a lot of information but realized I couldn’t make any money because I couldn’t charge people.

I then joined a small long-term care consulting group. This was in the Midwest, so I didn’t have to jump on the plane. I was in my car now—Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. I was helping struggling nursing homes that were getting dinged with citations from the state. They hired somebody like me to come in and help them fix their problems and mentor their director of nursing.

This story is really all tied together. On Sept. 29, 2006, I started working for the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI). When I arrived on the scene, STTI and The John A. Hartford Foundation were talking about the Maternal-Child Health Academy and how they could adapt that for geriatrics. And it all fell into place.

I was not hired for my gero prowess,  but my connections in long-term care helped me. I lived it and had an understanding of how that world works and could navigate it. My whole background before I got to STTI had been for-profit. In this job, I’ve gotten to see the other side that I never knew—the people who do all the research, who create the evidence that we implement. It has been a time of amazing growth for me.

All those eclectic experiences have culminated here, and hopefully we can experience some success, not because of me or in spite of me, but because I have a business background and the ability to build positive relationships with people. The whole thing goes back to the relationship that you build with people. That’s why the nursing home collaborative is here, because of me talking to people and going, “Hey, we can do that.” At STTI, because we’ve been around for 86 years and we have such a fabulous reputation for doing quality work and putting out quality programs, it’s not a hard sell.

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