Many people entering the later part of their 60s are planning their retirement or looking for a nice community to settle into where the weather’s warmer. This is not the case for Aline Holmes, a 67-year-old Plainsboro resident who is still actively advancing her education and career. One of her proudest personal goals will come true in May when she will receive a doctor of nursing practice (DNP) degree from Rutgers College of Nursing.
For Holmes, an executive at the Alexander Road-based New Jersey Hospital Association (NJHA) and a registered nurse for more than four decades, pursuing her doctorate is part of practicing what she preaches. “I am the co-director of the NJ Nursing Initiative, which is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiative to improve the nursing workforce, and one of the areas is increasing the number of doctoral-prepared nurses in New Jersey. It was on my bucket list, so I just went back to school for it three years ago,” Holmes says. “I needed to walk the walk.”
The oldest of five in a military family, Holmes moved frequently as a child. “I lived in Washington, D.C., North Carolina, New York, California, and Guantanamo, Cuba,” she says. Her parents met in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, and her father remained with the Marines until his retirement in 1962. Her mother became a stay-at-home mom.
Holmes entered the University of Massachusetts in 1964 with dreams of becoming a doctor. “My first choice of career was medicine, but my dad told me after my first year of college he couldn’t afford to pay for medical school, so he had me change my major to nursing,” she says. “I had to go to college for an extra year because of that change in major.”
In college Holmes joined the Navy, which paid for her last two years of school. After graduating in 1969 she was stationed at a hospital in Pensacola, Florida, until 1973 as part of the Navy Nurse Corps. The Vietnam War was ongoing, and her hospital was one of the main receiving hospitals in the U.S. “In Vietnam, if you were injured in the field, they got you stateside fast,” Holmes says. “We learned how to get them off the battlefield and save them. We learned a great deal from treating war veterans and put that into practice in healthcare.”
After six years in the Navy Holmes returned to school to earn her master of science in nursing from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and graduated in 1976. Her hospital background includes leadership roles in nursing administration, patient care services, and operations, and she has worked as a trauma and emergency nurse.
Holmes has called Plainsboro home twice in her travels across the country and now resides in the Ashford group of homes, where she currently sits on the association board. “My ex-husband and I moved here from Chicago in 1984. I was the new chief nursing officer at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center, and my husband joined a law firm in Philadelphia. Plainsboro was in the middle and had good schools,” Holmes says. “We moved into Princeton when our oldest was in high school and then moved back to Plainsboro when they had both graduated.” When her son and daughter were little Holmes coached basketball, was a Cub Scout leader, and attended lots of soccer and baseball games. Now adults, her daughter lives in New York City, and her son lives in Toms River with his wife and two daughters.
At NJHA, where she has worked since 2002, Holmes is senior vice president of clinical affairs and director of the NJHA Institute for Quality and Patient Safety. She also directs New Jersey’s Hospital Engagement Network, one of 27 such programs across the country funded by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The network participates in Partnership for Patients, a national initiative to improve the quality, safety, and affordability of healthcare.
Holmes continues to act on her passion for better patient care and health care services by improving her own education and experiences. In college, she says, “things were a little easier — not nearly as many medications to learn; hospitals were the center of the healthcare system.”
“The program I was in at Rutgers had a lot of older students, so I wasn’t alone, even though I was probably the oldest,” says Holmes, who continued working full-time while pursuing her DNP. “When I took my statistics course, when the instructor asked the class who had used the statistical program SPSS, everyone raised their hands, including me,” she says. “But when I used it last I punched cards and turned them into the teacher for processing; for that course at Rutgers I had to actually input the data. We didn’t have computers when I was working on my masters — not like we have today.”
Holmes sees healthcare moving from a hospital-centric system to one that is more patient-centric, chronic care and prevention management and community-based. “We have to help folks stay out of the hospital by taking better care of themselves. It’s going to be a major shift in how we view healthcare,” she says. She believes in focusing on improved care for New Jersey’s elderly residents. Holmes is a constant advocate for the elderly and under privileged populations of New Jersey; helping them find a voice within the medical community. “I think nursing is perfectly positioned to manage the care of this population, focusing on keeping them safe and as functional as possible in their own communities.”
Holmes also works on end-of-life initiatives. She worked on the NJ POLST (Practitioner Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) form, which is filled in jointly by an individual and a physician or advance practice nurse to put into writing the patient’s preferences for care and treatment options. Though the form is voluntary, “I encourage patients to discuss their personal healthcare goals with their physicians and loved ones, but also to document these wishes. This ensures that your wishes are expressed and respected,” Holmes says. “These conversations have the power to change lives.” Visit www.njha.com/POLST for more information.
Her formal education complete, Holmes will turn more attention to expanding the efforts of Children Can Shape the Future, a private foundation established by her late sister, Kathleen MacDonnell, to support educational efforts for disadvantaged children in the Camden and Philadelphia areas. “We support teachers working in disadvantaged areas who want to innovate or do something different that’s not funded by the public school system,” says Holmes, the board president.
What else remains on Holmes’ bucket list? “Maybe get a motorcycle?” she says. “Learn to speak Spanish fluently, play the piano.” But on the top of her list: “Spend more time with my grandchildren.”
