Latino Empowerment: Ildaura Murillo-Rohde

by | Aug 2, 2024 | Blog

The National Hispanic Council on Aging believes whole-heartedly that there must be better representation of the Hispanic/Latino community in healthcare. Medical expertise and treatments often elude the Hispanic population, due to a lack of cultural and linguistic competence seen in healthcare professionals.

Ildaura Murillo-Rohde, was someone who understood this. She was an innovator, a policy advocate, a nurse, and an educator.

Born in 1920, Ildaura Murillo-Rohde grew up in Panama, until immigrating to the United States in 1945. She quickly enrolled in the Medical and Surgical Hospital School of Nursing in San Antonio, Texas, where her journey as a socially aware political force would begin. It was during this time that Ildaura began to notice how few Hispanic people were working as nurses, and how disproportionate that was to the immense Hispanic population in Texas. She graduated with a nursing degree in 1948, and would soon after go on to pursue a second degree in the teaching and supervision of psychiatric nursing, from the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, in 1953.

She led a seasoned career as a nurse for years to come. Her work would develop a deep understanding in her, of the apparent intersection of social issues and healthcare, including what would later be known as PTSD, seen in Puerto Rican soldiers returning from the Korean War. Her focus on psychiatric care enriched her perspective, and she would go on to tackle issues of grander societal scale.

In 1971, Ildaura Murillo-Rohde earned her PhD from New York University (NYU), the first Hispanic Nurse to do so at NYU. She would later become the first Hispanic associate dean for the Nursing School at the University of Washington.

In 1974, the American Nurses Association (ANA) held a convention in Atlantic City, where a group of like-minded Hispanic professionals would meet to discuss the creation of a Hispanic Nurses Caucus within the ANA, Ildaura amongst them. They met again in 1976, at the following ANA convention held in San Francisco, California, where their plans changed to creating a separate association all together for Hispanic nurses. At the time, this new association was known as the National Association of Spanish-Speaking Spanish-Surnamed Nurses (NASSSN).

Ildaura volunteered to incorporate the NASSSN, and did so in Washington State, where she was still working as associate dean for UW’s nursing school. It was later renamed as the National Association of Hispanic Nurses (NAHN) in 1979, as it remains to this day. Ildaura Murillo-Rohde was its first president, and held the position from 1976 to 1980.

Following this crowning achievement, she was also the first Hispanic Dean at NYU’s School of Nursing, and would go on to provide her expertise to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the United States federal government.

Ildaura Murillo-Rohde passed away much later in 2010 at the age of 89 years old, in her native home of Panama. She was a force to be reckoned with, and made a profound impact on the future of Hispanic nurses and healthcare policy.

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