Nursing School

Ground has been broken for an affordable housing complex in West Baltimore, the developer has announced. The $14 million revitalization on the south side of the 3000 block of West North Avenue will consist of two low-rise, elevator buildings. It will replace 20 vacant lots and seven vacant rowhouses, according to a statement released Monday by The Woda Group LLC. Plans call for 22 one-bedroom and 42 two-bedroom units in the buildings. The apartments, which should be complete in June, will be leased to tenants with incomes at or below 60 percent of Baltimore's median income, Woda's statement said.

Ground has been broken for an affordable housing complex in West Baltimore, the developer has announced. The $14 million revitalization on the south side of the 3000 block of West North Avenue will consist of two low-rise, elevator buildings. It will replace 20 vacant lots and seven vacant rowhouses, according to a statement released Monday by The Woda Group LLC. Plans call for 22 one-bedroom and 42 two-bedroom units in the buildings. The apartments, which should be complete in June, will be leased to tenants with incomes at or below 60 percent of Baltimore's median income, Woda's statement said.

Martha N. Hill, a national leader in research on racial disparities in health, has been appointed dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. Hill, who has served as interim dean for the past year, was the first nonphysician to serve as president of the American Heart Association. A Hopkins faculty member for 22 years, Hill is known for developing strategies to control high blood pressure among urban and medically underserved African-Americans. She also played a key role in the formation of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute.

The first Port Palooza of the season was a grand success Saturday. There were lots of folks in town listening to music, browsing the vendors, eating along the river, strolling Main Street and enjoying the beautifully sunny day. The next Palooza on June 2 will feature a collection of various medium titled "Creatures of the Susquehanna, Real and Imagined" in the historic Bank Building. These original works of art are contributed by the Cecil County Boys and Girls Club. Martha Barchowski, past president of the CCBGC, will be on hand that day to answer any questions concerning this project.

Sister Mary Naomi, a former director of Mercy Medical Center's nursing school, died Thursday of complications of cancer at the downtown institution. She was 75 and lived in her order's retirement home in the Pinehurst section of Baltimore County. Born Marian Zerhusen in Baltimore, she was raised in Annapolis, where she attended St. Mary's School. She graduated from Notre Dame of Maryland, now Notre Dame Preparatory School, in 1945. In later years, she often spoke of how during a snowstorm in the 1940s, she was the only student to show up for classes, and that she had the farthest distance to travel - on the old Baltimore & Annapolis Railroad.

A University of Texas nursing dean who specializes in women's health issues was named yesterday as dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Janet D. Allan, vice chair of a national task force that recently issued new recommendations for mammography screening, will replace Barbara R. Heller on Aug. 1 as head of Maryland's nursing school. Allan, 59, has been dean for almost five years of the Health Science Center at San Antonio, the largest of nine schools of nursing in the University of Texas system.

Mary Angela D'Elia, a homemaker who loved spending her summers at the beach, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at her Catonsville home. She was 83. Mary Angela Ricker was born in Irvington and moved with her family to Catonsville in 1927. She graduated from Catonsville High School in 1936. While attending nursing school at St. Agnes, she met her future husband, Dr. Lawrence N. D'Elia, an obstetrician and gynecologist who died in 1991. Mrs. D'Elia graduated from nursing school in 1941 and worked in that profession until her marriage five years later, when she left to raise a family.

Nursing school enrollments rose sharply this year, according to a new study, raising hopes that the 4-year-old nursing shortage may be easing.Preliminary results from the study, by the National League for Nursing, found that about 230,000 students were enrolled in registered nurse programs this fall, a 14 percent increase over last year's enrollment of 201,458. The highest enrollment in the -- past 20 years was 250,000 students in 1983.While the current shortage still has many hospitals scrambling to find enough qualified nurses, experts in the field say they expect it to ease gradually over the next few years.

In 1949, almost on a whim, Esther McCready requested an application from an all-white nursing school. That began a court battle that lasted more than a year, enlisted the talents of a young attorney named Thurgood Marshall, and integrated the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore. The hard-won letter that McCready received admitting her to the class of 1953 and the Florence Nightingale cap -- or "Flossie" -- that she later earned are on display at the Lewis Museum. At the time, Provident Hospital in Baltimore had a nursing program that accepted black students.

A major partner in a program that would help women recovering from drug addiction aboard a former Navy vessel is pulling out of the project, its funding in jeopardy because of uncertainty about the ship's berth in Baltimore. The University of Maryland School of Nursing won a federal grant two years ago to provide health care and training aboard the former hospital ship, called the Sanctuary. But that project has been stalled for years by a court battle with the Maryland Port Administration over whether its organizers have a right to a permanent berth at a state-owned pier.

Sarah "Virginia" Littleton, a retired nurse and part owner of a Baltimore County pharmacy and nursing home, died Thursday at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson of renal failure complicated by a stroke. She was 83. Mrs. Littleton, born Sarah Meyer in Baltimore, was raised in Highlandtown by a grandmother, Sarah Pugh Meyer. Mrs. Littleton's father, a shipbuilder for Bethlehem Steel, also lived with them. As a young woman, Mrs. Littleton worked for General Motors as an operator of a comptometer, a mechanical calculator, but she quit her job to care for her terminally ill grandmother.

Janset Nahum, a registered nurse and neighborhood activist who was known as the "Unofficial Mayor of Sugarville," died March 9 of lung cancer at Gilchrist Hospice in Towson. She was 79. Janset Aranlar was born in Adapazari, near Istanbul, one of three children. After her father died when she was 2, her mother was unable to care for her, and she was put up for adoption. "She was adopted by a wonderful couple who adored and raised her," said her husband of 50 years, Dr. Albert Nahum, a retired internist and former chief of staff at the old Church Home Hospital.

The Johns Hopkins University has the No. 1 nursing school in the country according to rankings of graduate programs released Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report. Multiple programs at Hopkins, the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore — the state's leading centers for graduate education — finished in the top 25 in the magazine's rankings. The ratings for medical, law and other graduate schools incorporate test scores, undergraduate grades, acceptance rates and peer assessments.

Marie R. Riley, whose nursing career spanned nearly 50 years and included working in a pioneering Harford County stroke program in the 1960s, died Monday of pneumonia at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air. She was 102 and had lived in Timonium. The daughter of farmers, Marie Rahll was born and raised at her parents' farm on Putnam Road in Pleasantville, Harford County. "She remembered going to Bel Air with her father in the horse and buggy. [He] tied up the horse to a hitching post on Main Street, which was nothing but mud," said a son, James W. Riley of Fallston.

When she was fresh out of nursing school in the early 1970s, the last thing Mary Fridley expected to do with her life was work with the elderly. "How depressing would that be?" she says she thought at the time. Then she took a temporary job at a nursing home, where she met the Caroler. She doesn't remember his name, but Fridley could not recall the man more clearly. He was so far along in his dementia that he needed caregivers to feed him. He had such a bad habit of scraping his knuckles on things that he had to wear mittens.

Would you pay two mechanics with equivalent skills to both work on your car if one of them could do the job alone? Obviously not, yet that's the kind of unnecessary cost you're likely to pay if you're among the many patients every year who get sick or injured and require anesthesia. Two groups of medical professionals are trained to administer anesthesia: nurses who have been specially trained as nurse anesthetists and physicians specially trained as anesthesiologists. Despite compelling evidence that both groups provide equally safe anesthesia care, the majority of states, including Maryland, still adhere to a federal government rule requiring nurse anesthetists to be supervised by physician anesthesiologists when providing care to Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Faced with a shortage of nurses, Carroll County General Hospital created a mentoring program - a move that has boosted its nursing staff while others across the state scramble for recruits. Begun several months ago, the well-received program pairs veteran nurses with new employees or interns for up to a year and provides incentives for interns to join Carroll's staff. Supervising mentors oversee the pairs and offer guidance. The goal is not only to retain and hire more nurses but to build and maintain a support network for the hospital's nursing staff.

Elizabeth G. "Bette" Singleton, a retired registered nurse and a gardener, died March 9 of a stroke at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. The Catonsville resident was 84. Elizabeth Greening Rohr, the daughter of an English artist and a saleswoman, was born at home on Edmondson Avenue. She was a 1943 graduate of Western High School. She was a 1947 graduate of the University of Maryland School of Nursing and joined the nursing school faculty in 1951. While at the University of Maryland, she met Robert Tiffany Singleton Sr., a pre-med student from Pennsylvania, whom she married in 1949.

Eighty years ago, a courageous teacher urged my mother to leave West Virginia to attend nursing school in Baltimore. That teacher feared that my mother could never achieve her dream of becoming a registered nurse if she tried to pursue it in the West Virginia of the l930s. My mother's parents were immigrants from Southern Italy, and despite owning their house, working every day and sacrificing a son in the Pacific during World War Two, practicing Catholics were not fully accepted in their community.