2024 Archie M. Griffin Professional Achievement Award

“I worked as a nurse to pay off the refrigerator, and then I worked to pay off the washer and dryer and the car,” Milstead says. “I had part-time jobs, and the rest of the time I was at home with our children.”

But in 1978, her life changed drastically. She had just earned her master’s degree in nursing from Ohio State when her husband, age 42, died of a heart attack. Milstead was devastated.

“We had four children and a brand-new mortgage,” she says. “I was teaching on a nine-month contract, and you can’t keep a family together with that. I thought, ‘I'm going to have to do something different.’"

She went to work full-time, landing at the Ohio Nurses Association, where she got her first taste of working on health policy. “It was eye opening,” she says. “I had a lot to learn.” Back then, public policy was not a required part of the nursing curriculum, and national and state nursing organizations were just dipping their toes into the field.

Milstead decided she would lead the charge to ensure that nurses’ voices were heard. “Nurses can conceptualize complex health issues at the 50,000-mile high level and immediately bring them down to ground level to explain things to officials in language they understand,” she says.  “We have real-life stories about people who are dealing with health problems and issues that policymakers are trying to solve.”

Before the turn of this century, there were few resources to teach nurses about healthcare policy, so Milstead and several colleagues wrote a theory- and research-based textbook. In 1999, she published Health Policy and Politics: A Nurse's Guide. The first of its kind, it is now sold in 22 countries.

Milstead also has trained generations of nursing students to make a difference. She led a distinguished teaching career at Clemson University in South Carolina and Duquesne University in Pennsylvania and served as dean of the college of nursing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Along the way, she earned a PhD in political science.

The American Nurses Association has bestowed top honors on Milstead, but she is not one to rest on her laurels. At age 88, she is working on the eighth edition of the nurses’ policy guide, which now bears her name at the publisher’s insistence.