A Lifetime of Achievement

To Professor Maryann Fralic, DrPH, RN, FAAN, a 2012 AONE Lifetime Achievement Award was a telling moment: It told her it was time to close a brilliant chapter at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing—”a place I have loved for 20 years!”—and begin the next one.

“There seemed to be a line of demarcation about that,” she said at a retirement dinner in her honor earlier this year.

Throughout her career, Fralic has served in a diversity of roles demonstrating her expertise in health services administration and executive nursing practice. At Hopkins, she held joint appointments with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carey Business School. Fralic has served as a senior consultant for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellows Program, trustee of the Institute for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health, and fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and the Johnson & Johnson-Wharton program in management for nurses. She also served as vice president of nursing at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Lessons learned? “I was agonizing over whether to accept a position at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. But it would require me moving to New Jersey while my husband worked in Pittsburgh. Finally, I said to Don, ‘What if it is a mistake?’ He didn’t hesitate for a moment, and said, ‘That’s easy, you just come back home!’ I had focused on the need to make perfect decisions, a feminine view, and he was coming from the guy’s view that it is OK to make mistakes. Hopkins would not have happened if I did not make that move. Importantly, I was much more resilient in making decisions after that. Quite a gift.”