Q. What were your parents doing in County Mayo, Ireland?

A. My parents were Irish, and we immigrated to the East Coast when I was about 6. So I grew up in Philadelphia. There were three others of us, and one more after we got here. So I'm the oldest of five, and the only girl. My father actually was the typical Irishman. He ran a bar in Philadelphia. My mother worked in a factory, Nabisco cookies, on the line, doing whatever you did.

Q. Is there a particular reason you went into nursing?

A. It was a time when there weren't a lot of options open for women. In the '60s, you became a nurse, a teacher or a nun. I'm sure you hear that story a lot here, too. Parents want you to get a job. You have to make a living. That's very important when your parents are immigrants.

Q. What attracted you to Hawai'i and/or UH?

A. I was actually happy where I was. But professionally, there was that restlessness that comes. At the same time, my kids were both in college, and my husband and I were both looking around thinking we might want to do something different. My husband is Asian. So when we started that conversation he said, I want to be somewhere where there's an Asian culture. When I really looked at UH, it felt like a really good fit, and a place where I could have an impact. I like the student body, and I'm a public university person. I'm an immigrant. So even though people look at me and would never think that, that really is where my heart is. I'm really committed to giving people a leg up. While going to Harvard is great, for a lot of people, UH is going to be their option. So that's important for me to be part of that. Then I saw the work the faculty is doing — the rural health, the underprivileged, vulnerable population — that's the work I've always done. And so that was a good fit.

Q. How is the nursing school positioned to help with the worldwide nursing shortage and, in particular, with Hawai'i's nursing shortage?

A. The shortage is the biggest issue, and it's a shortage in both numbers and also in quality. UH, as the state school and as a land-grant university, has a responsibility to the community. We need to be producing nurses that are from Hawai'i, that are committed to staying in Hawai'i, and that are absolutely the best they can be. We're looking at strategies to increase enrollment — here at Manoa, in particular — but also looking system-wide throughout UH to be sure there's a UH approach to the nursing shortage — not a Manoa approach, not a KCC approach. Where Manoa is going to make the biggest contribution is preparing the faculty for the other schools to allow the associate degrees to expand. Their big issue is they can't get the faculty to expand, so we're trying to help do that. We were asked (by the governor's office) could you produce another 100 nurses per year at each site if we supported you? Our answer is yes. We have to be committed to change. I think we can find some innovative solutions.

Q. Is there a lack of interest among incoming students?

A. No. We don't have enough slots. We turned away another 40 students for the spring semester — well-qualified students — because we just don't have the faculty. The Legislature was great. They've given us a five new positions, so we've taken another 20 students this year and we'll take another 30 by the end of the year. By September, we hope to double our enrollment. But our local students have done really well and want to come in but we can't take them.

Q. While you're looking at getting more slots for qualified students, how do you keep them in Hawai'i after they graduate given the world-wide nursing shortage and the opportunities nurses have to travel the world?

A. Many of our students want to stay here. The salaries are coming up, so it's becoming easier for them to stay. But we need to be working with the institutions (Hawai'i hospitals) to make sure the career growth is there, the continuing education and the opportunities for graduate studies. I'm sure there are people who are going to be adventuresome and want to travel. But we're really starting to look at all of that. We want to be active in nursing in the state, to be seen as a voice for nursing, and supporting the rest of the system.

Q. A lot of people have been talking about recruiting even more nurses to Hawai'i from the Philippines. Will that help?

A. I have a real concern about brain-drain issues. Because of my work with AIDS, I've done a lot of global work in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Africa. Brain drain there in nursing is a significant issue, and the Philippines and India fit in with that. Because they produce excellent nurses that are English-speaking, they're a target. People don't immigrate because they want to — usually it's an economic issue. I don't see the solution as flying in planeloads of nurses from the Philippines. We really have to understand that to improve our solution at the expense of another country doesn't make us good global partners. We have to be willing to use the money that we would spend bringing in nurses and invest it here on education. In South Africa, they would pay a quarter of a million dollars to recruit nurses away. Well then the next morning they'd have to close a unit because 50 nurses had been recruited away. I worked in Guyana, another English-speaking country in the Caribbean, and nurses were being recruited away to America and the UK while their faculty didn't have textbooks to teach.

Q. You want the school of nursing to be more involved with community issues?

A. Individually, our faculty is involved and the university has some involvement. But it's now time to roll up our sleeves and say: "What can we do at the community level? Be provocative with us." We need to be concerned with emergency preparedness, whether we're talking about natural disasters, bio-terrorism, influenza pandemic. The school has not been involved with that, but we want to be involved. We're not looking for resources. We're looking to bring our faculty skills and our students to the table. If something happens, rather than being part of the chaos, we want to be part of the solution.

The other area we're not active enough in is aging. The Hawai'i population is aging twice as fast, more than anywhere else in the country. We're going to need nurses who are experienced and want to take care of elderly people, from healthy independent elders to institutionalized care. It's a bit of a hard sell with students. Students want to see acute care, critical care, emergencies, because they're young. We need to integrate it into our curriculum.

Q. But many of your students have likely been taking care of Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie and Uncle. Wouldn't some of them naturally gravitate toward geriatric care?

A. Sometimes that can be a negative, because it felt like a responsibility.

— Interviewed by Dan Nakaso, Advertiser staff writer