Tina Davis DeLapp is being recognized for achievement in health care education; while she worked primarily in Anchorage, her impact was regional and national.

DeLapp was born in Los Angeles in 1946, moving to Arizona at the age of 7. She began her career in health care when she was 13 years old, volunteering a record-setting 1000 hours as a Candy Striper at a Phoenix-area hospital and getting involved in her high school chapter of the Junior Red Cross. In her desire to help others, she was clearly following in the footsteps of her Registered Nurse mother. Also in high school, following in the footsteps of her father, she got involved in journalism, working on the high school newspaper and as a teen correspondent to a Phoenix newspaper. Her entry into study in the Good Samaritan Hospital School of Nursing and her eventual editorship of her nursing school student newspaper were merely continuations of her activities as a high schooler.

Encouraged to continue her education at Arizona State University by her mother and by an American Nurses Association position paper that stressed the need for nurses to hold college degrees, DeLapp began planning to complete her baccalaureate degree in nursing while still a first-year nursing student. Her summer breaks from nursing studies were spent completing the additional coursework required for an eventual degree and working full-time as, first a nursing assistant, and later as a licensed practical nurse (LPN), until earning her nursing diploma from Good Samaritan Hospital School of Nursing in 1967. Her baccalaureate degree was awarded in June 1969 – but by then she was already off on her next great adventure – marriage and a move to Bethel, Alaska with her new husband, John, a civil engineer and commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service.

Never satisfied with being professionally involved in just one activity, while working as a staff nurse at the Alaska Native Hospital in Bethel, DeLapp volunteered to develop and teach a nursing pharmacology course to enable the hospital’s LPNs to expand their scope of practice to include medication administration. It was while working in Bethel that she came to recognize the importance of health care providers being culturally connected to their clients, a recognition that would drive many of her future career actions.

In 1970, DeLapp accepted a position with the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation as a trainer in the Community Health Aide Program, teaching both the beginning and third phases of the curriculum, enabling her to work closely with students who relocated from their rural communities to Bethel for their two-week training program. It was that experience that taught her how marginalized many Alaska Natives felt in their interactions with their highly educated health care providers, all of whom came from “somewhere else.” That, in combination with the recognition that absolutely none of the professional level staff were of Alaska Native origin, led to her belief that the population would be better served if at least some of the professionals providing their care were culturally connected to their clientele.

After a stop at the University of Colorado to earn a Master’s degree in Nursing, DeLapp’s next stop was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where she taught nursing courses at Bacone College. Bacone was a small liberal arts college established in 1880 as The Indian University to educate American Indian students. Despite the school’s commitment to liberal arts education and American Indian students, by the time DeLapp arrived on campus, the college had evolved to admitting students of all ethnicities and had added a small tuition-revenue generating associate degree nursing program. There she found a temporary home, teaching hospital-based clinical courses, helping to implement a curriculum based on students’ achievement of specified learning outcomes and helping to write a grant for a new nursing building. Having learned important lessons about cultural connectivity while in Bethel, she scandalized some of her nursing faculty colleagues when she granted a worried Cheyenne Indian nursing student an excused absence to go home to consult with her tribal medicine woman about a troubling issue.

After two years in Muskogee and an additional year in California, in 1975, the DeLapp family, now with a toddler daughter and an infant son, were reassigned to Anchorage, Alaska. Once there, DeLapp joined the nursing faculty at Alaska Methodist University (AMU), becoming involved in early efforts to achieve national accreditation of the nursing program. When AMU closed a year later, she transferred with the entire nursing program to what was then known as Anchorage Senior College, a sort of urban stepchild of the University of Alaska, based in Fairbanks. The addition of the nursing program nearly doubled the size and significantly altered the gender distribution of the Senior College faculty and brought with it the first lower division courses offered by the fledgling institution, along with its first Curriculum and Student Affairs Committees. Eventually, the baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs became the first nationally accredited programs at the Senior College, which gradually evolved into the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). After DeLapp initiated a Nursing Honor Society Steering Committee in 1986, the Theta Omicron Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau became the first nationally chartered honor society on the UAA campus. Over the years, DeLapp felt privileged to participate in the evolution of both the School of Nursing and the Senior College into the mature educational organizations that exist today.

DeLapp’s career as a nurse educator also evolved. Initially she taught undergraduate classroom and clinical courses in nursing, pathophysiology, pharmacology and nursing research. Her teaching skill was acknowledged with five Outstanding Instructor awards from graduating seniors and, in 1994 with a Chancellors Award for Teaching Excellence. During that time, she published articles on health issues particularly affecting Alaskans (frostbite and accidental hypothermia) as well as healthy aging. She also conducted research on Traditional Inupiat Health Practices (for the North Slope Borough) and on the effectiveness of Alaska’s Home Health Aid Program.

DeLapp was also involved in faculty governance, eventually chairing the School of Nursing Curriculum Committee, and the UAA Academic Affairs Board, serving as Faculty Senate President and representing Anchorage faculty on the statewide University Assembly. Community involvement included teaching CPR courses in the community, chairing the Board of the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center and serving as a board member of Anchorage Home Health, Inc.

Along the way, DeLapp earned an Ed.D. in Higher & Post-Secondary Education from the University of Southern California, studying faculty teaching tasks across academic disciplines. She also became active in regional and national nursing education activities, becoming a nursing program accreditation and Evaluation Review Panel member for the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission, and being elected Treasurer and Governor of the Western Institute of Nursing. She also served a term as the Nurse Educator representative on the Alaska Board of Nursing, participating in the development of a decision-making model for expanding the scope of practice of experienced LPNs, a model that was highlighted in the official publication of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

She assumed increasing leadership positions in the School of Nursing, initially becoming a Level Coordinator, then Associate Dean of Nursing, and, in 1996 Director of the School of Nursing. Along the way, she was promoted to Full Professor. By then the UAA nursing programs now included associate degree, baccalaureate, and graduate nursing programs. Under her leadership, the program completed several highly successful nursing accreditation cycles in which her leadership was cited as a strength of the program. She also set the school up to host a respected doctoral (PhD) program offered by an outside institution (Oregon Health & Science University) on the UAA campus (It commenced as she was retiring from full-time UAA employment.).

DeLapp’s most significant impact as a nurse educator was achieved at UAA where she worked to ensure that Alaska’s nursing workforce was well prepared and sufficiently sized and appropriately located to meet statewide needs.  With support from a University-Industry Task Force on the Nursing Shortage, she developed and led the implementation of a plan to double undergraduate nursing enrollments and graduations from UAA. The plan extended enrollment in the associate degree nursing program to six communities outside of the Anchorage bowl, eventually doubling its annual enrollments from 32 to 60+. It also shifted the baccalaureate program to a trimester schedule, admitting, and graduating larger classes three times a year (increasing annual admissions 64 to 120 students). Planned to be fully implemented over four years, enrollments doubled in only two years.

In 1998, DeLapp initiated and led the development of a project to recruit and retain Alaska Natives in nursing (Project RRANN), to recruit Alaska Natives to a nursing career and to facilitate their transition to and success through the nursing program. Funded from 1998 through 2005 with federal grants she authored, the number of Alaska Native nurses enrolled in the nursing programs had significantly increased by the time she retired in 2004. No longer reliant on grant funding, RRANN continues today to meet statewide needs for culturally connected nurses. DeLapp’s statement that provided the basis for creating RRANN still appears on its website: “Providing culturally relevant health care is not a matter of political correctness; rather, it is often a matter of life and death. When cultural competence is missing from health care, important information is not communicated, symptoms of illness are overlooked of misinterpreted and patient outcomes suffer.”

DeLapp’s achievements have been recognized by the various organizations in which she was professionally involved. She was the first Alaska nurse to be inducted into the Western Academy of Nursing (1999) and received awards for Leadership (2002) and Mentorship (2006) from the Western Institute of Nursing (WIN), eventually attaining emeritus status in the organization (2007) as she retired from the Board.

On her retirement from full-time employment at UAA in 2004, she was awarded Emeritus status. This was followed up in 2011 by the naming of the Tina DeLapp classroom on the UAA campus and in 2022 by the presentation of a Meritorious Service Award. She was appointed to Emeritus status by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (2005) and in 2013 she became the first – and still the only – Alaskan to be inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She also became a consultant to federally funded nursing enrollment and expansion grant projects in the Southwest U.S.

And in retirement she became involved in non-nursing community activities, joining the Board and becoming Treasurer of the League of Women Voters of Anchorage and becoming an enthusiastic Voter Registrar of newly naturalized American citizens and eligible high school seniors. She continues to register high school seniors, regularly visiting high school government classes.  She also joined the Board of the Alaska Kidney Foundation, serving as its vice-president until 2019 when it transitioned into the Alaska Community Foundation. She continues to review funding applications to meet the needs of Alaskans with chronic kidney disease.

Unable to stay away from the UAA School of Nursing, she has turned her attention to increasing opportunities for its students. In 2018, along with two other emerita nursing faculty, she led the creation of the UAA Nursing Endowed Scholarship fund, an activity that was recognized by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which named her its Volunteer Philanthropist of the Year in 2023. Now fully endowed with a fund exceeding $300,000. It will eventually fund ten annual scholarships and has already facilitated the graduation of several nursing students across the state. She recently turned her attention to raising funds to fully endow the New Nurse Scholar Award fund. This Award provides funding support to UAA nursing students in presenting their scholarly work at the annual conference of the Western Institute of Nursing.

DeLapp continues to review abstracts submitted for presentation at a regional nursing research conference and applications for funding of nursing research proposals, and reviews manuscripts submitted for publication to nursing journals. Since her official retirement, her reviews of 35+ health-related books have been published in Choice Magazine. She recently updated a chapter in a Transcultural Nursing textbook that will appear later in 2024.

The rest of her post-retirement time is spent RVing with John DeLapp, her husband of 55+ years, and visiting her adult children who live on opposite coasts – Julia in Connecticut and Scott in San Diego – and spoiling her four grandchildren both in person and via long distance! When asked to identify crucial influences in her life, she points to her nurse mother, who demonstrated excellence in her own varied nursing career, to supervisors who assigned her to professionally challenging tasks, and to the support of the faculty and staff of the UAA School of Nursing. By far, she identifies the most important fuelers of her success as the unwavering support, encouragement, and patience of her husband, John, and her children, Julia and Scott. They continue to ease her discouragements, while applauding her successes.