16 Facts About Florence Wald

Florence Wald was an American nurse, former Dean of Yale School of Nursing, and largely credited as "the mother of the American hospice movement".

Florence Wald led the founding of Connecticut Hospice, the first hospice program in the United States.

Late in life, Wald became interested in the provision of hospice care within prisons.

In 1998, Florence Wald was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Florence Wald received a second master's degree from Yale University in mental health nursing in 1956 and became an instructor at the school's nursing program.

Florence Wald became Dean of Yale School of Nursing in 1959, after being named to the position on an acting basis the previous year.

An "indelible impression" was made by Dr Saunders, with Florence Wald noting that "until then I had thought nurses were the only people troubled by how a terminal illness was treated".

Florence Wald left her position as dean in 1966, with plans to develop a hospice in the United States similar to the one Saunders was developing in England.

St Christopher's Hospice opened in 1967; Florence Wald worked there for a month in 1969.

Florence Wald's husband left his engineering firm and enrolled at Columbia University in 1971 with a major in hospital planning.

Florence Wald conducted a two-year research program studying how terminally ill patients fared at home or in a healthcare facility, and tracked how patients and their families felt throughout the process.

Well into her 80s, Florence Wald traveled to prisons in Connecticut performing a research project on behalf of the National Prison Hospice Association, an organization founded in 1991 and based in Boulder, Colorado.

Florence Wald worked on considering ways to make hospice care available to those incarcerated in the prison system, including training inmates to become hospice volunteers for dying inmates or arranging for outside hospice care for inmates granted compassionate leave given their medical condition.

Florence Wald noted that training prisoners to provide such care would assist the terminally ill and help rehabilitate the volunteers at almost no cost to the prisons.

Florence Wald was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1996 from Yale University, Wald was introduced as "the mother of the American hospice movement".

Florence Wald died at age 91 on November 8,2008, at her home in Branford, Connecticut.