(Press-News.org)
Many years ago, Cynthia Jacelon got an entry-level job in a challenging healthcare niche. It became the inspiration for a long, joyful and groundbreaking career in every dimension of nursing – for which she is now being honored.
“I am one of the few people who actually went to nursing school to work with older adults,” explains Jacelon, professor emerita at the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing and senior advisor at the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation. “I had gotten a job as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home, and I really loved it. I loved promoting function in older people.”
For a career with international impact that spans nursing practice, research, education and policy, Jacelon has been tapped to receive a 2025 Living Legend in Massachusetts Nursing Award by the American Nurses Association Massachusetts (ANAMASS). She will be honored Friday at the 2025 ANAMASS Awards Gala in Framingham.
“Her mentorship over many decades has been instrumental in shaping the next generation of nursing leaders, cultivating a culture of excellence, innovation and collaboration in nursing education both in the U.S. and abroad,” states the nomination from Nursing Dean Allison Vorderstrasse, faculty members Lisa Wolf, Gabrielle Abelard, Jeungok Choi and Karen Giuliano and colleague Linda Donoghue. “Her scholarship is widely recognized for its significant impact on gerontological nursing, rehabilitation and self-management in vulnerable populations.”
Jacelon’s first job as a nurse was in an acute care rehab unit. “It was not what I had intended. However, it actually married my interest in older individuals and my interest in function. Rehabilitation nursing helps people be independent and helps people function.”
After earning her bachelor’s degree, she moved to New England, where she went to graduate school at Boston University to become a rehabilitation clinical nurse specialist, funded with a grant from the Rehabilitation Services Administration. Working in rehab at a higher level made her think more about the experience of the patients and motivated her to move on to research.
In rehabilitation units, patients no matter their age try to get back to doing the things they would do at home – get out of bed and get dressed, sit down for their meals in the dining room and decide what activities to do during the day. “Well, when I started teaching here clinically, I noticed that older adults in acute care just sort of sat around all day waiting for something to happen,” Jacelon says. “And I thought, gee, what are they doing to affect the outcome of their hospitalization?”
That question became the focus of her doctoral dissertation at New York University, where she earned her Ph.D. in nursing theory development and research. “Out of that came a model of personal integrity – that older adults use different strategies to manage their health,” she says. “That was a qualitative dissertation. The next thing you do is to quantify and test it.”
While Jacelon had no problem finding measures of physical health, like function and ability, she found no way to measure a sense of dignity. “There was nothing. Everyone said dignity was important, but no one had done any scientific work on the concept.”
That led her “on a very long journey” of research projects to develop the concept of attributed dignity in older adults. It became known as the Jacelon Attributed Dignity Scale (JADS), first published in Research in Gerontological Nursingin 2009. It is used widely across the globe, has been translated into Chinese, Greek and Persian, and is currently being translated into Finnish and soon, Japanese.
More recently, Jacelon was the lead investigator and director of the National Institutes of Health-funded UManage Center for Building the Science of Symptom Self-Management at UMass Amherst. The center focused on using wearable and handheld devices to help people manage symptoms of fatigue and sleep disturbances. “It was really exciting and wonderful for both me and the College of Nursing, and it was focused again on that idea of function in older adults,” Jacelon says.
Her work in gerontological and rehabilitation nursing and such leadership roles as president of the National Association of Rehabilitation Nurses have earned her many honors over the years, from the Paul Winske Award for Improving Access for Disabled Individuals in 2014 to the Elviria Whiting Ball Award for Improving the Lives of Older Adults in 2019. She also was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
Her research has been cited more than 5,000 times. “I think that says that the work I’ve done has been meaningful to the profession, and that’s something I’m most proud of.”
More than 30 years after she joined the nursing faculty at UMass Amherst, Jacelon – who has three married children, eight grandchildren and four great grandchildren (with another on the way) – is still teaching and doing research, helping with a study on educating caregivers of people with dementia. “My husband, John Ridgway [a 2004 UMass Amherst Ph.D. graduate in computer scientist], says I failed at retirement,” she jokes. “I’m one of the people who has done exactly what they should have been doing for their whole career.”
END
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