The Sarah E. Allison Endowed Chair in Research and Self-Care

SARAH ELIZABETH ALLISON, Class of 1953, was an innovator who devoted her life and career to Dorothea Orem’s groundbreaking theories of patient self-care matched with nursing support to maximize healing.

While a graduate student in Washington, DC, Allison began working with Orem on the latter’s Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory, bringing its tenets to the Wilmer Eye Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital as clinical director of nursing in the mid-1970s. In 1991, Allison helped found the International Orem Society for Nursing Science and Scholarship. Her continuing research included the preservation of the Dorothea Orem Collection at the Chesney Medical Archives.

Born in Baltimore in 1925, Allison died in June 2017 in Jackson, MS. Her funding for this endowed professorship confirms Johns Hopkins Nursing’s commitment to quality, patient-centered care that maintains dignity and independence.