Biography
Health promotion and disease prevention are hallmarks of Rose Mays’ nursing career.
As an inner city public health nurse in the late 1960s, she had the unpleasant task of informing a young mother that her newborn was blind due to congenital rubella syndrome. The case was memorable because of the family’s devastating heartache but also because it personally caught Mays off guard. She explains, “I had just come from an acute care setting where tragedies were commonplace. I was not prepared for this kind of drama in a well baby clinic!”
Just a few years later, a safe and effective vaccine for rubella was approved and, as a school nurse, Mays immunized hundreds of needy Indianapolis area children in order to protect pregnant women from this infection. Today rubella has been effectively eliminated in the U.S. due to aggressive public health efforts.
Her desire to become more deeply involved in prevention led her to complete a master's degree, become a pediatric nurse practitioner, and join the IU nursing faculty. Through her teaching and practice Mays focused on a previously neglected population, adolescents. “The teen years are key for establishing good health behaviors. Yet in the early 1980s few in pediatrics were concentrating on this group,” she said. This emphasis resulted in her collaboration with several community agencies to improve care for disenfranchised pregnant teens and homeless youth.
Mays went on to earn her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. This background helped her infuse the PNP curriculum with adolescent-relevant content and help develop the campus’ Leadership Education in Adolescent Health (LEAH) program.
Through her work with LEAH colleagues, Mays’ career interest once again turned to vaccines. Although vaccines are one of the most effective methods of disease prevention, they are often underutilized. So when in the mid-1990s, vaccines against HIV, herpes, and human papillomavirus (HPV) were being touted as “silver bullets” against these primarily sexually transmitted conditions, her group challenged the wisdom of this thinking.
Mays elaborates, “We reasoned there were a multitude of potential reasons for the non-acceptance of such vaccines by consumers and providers alike.” Their 2000 paper, “Vaccines against Sexually Transmitted Infections: Promise and Problems of the Magic Bullets for Prevention and Control,” launched the team's systematic investigation into factors affecting STD vaccine uptake. This research team went on to involve a number of graduate and undergraduate students.
When teaching about health promotion and disease prevention issues, Professor Mays encourages students to always be mindful of the need to reduce health and healthcare disparities. Delivering quality care to marginalized individuals is a passion threaded throughout her career.