Recognition

Ruthie Gitlen was 17 years old when she joined the Cadet Nursing Corp in 1944. She was 20 in 1947 when she graduated, became licensed in the state of Connecticut, and worked in a hospital there for a short time before her family moved to Miami, Florida. Today she is 98 years old and still maintains her nursing license in Florida, studying and retaking her continuing education exams every other year.
During the course of her 78 years as a Registered Nurse, she and her family drove health equity through innovation and design. Those weren’t terms used when they were doing it, but that is what they achieved.

In 1947 when they arrived in Florida, the family opened the Rock Convalescent Home, which served 45 patients. It was there that they created the first integrated nursing care facility in the area. Not only did “The Rock” not divide or discriminate based on race, but it had no divisions based on age, sex, or religion either. This integrated nursing home did not only serve patients of all races and ethnicities without bias, but their employees were treated as equals as well. For their entire career, Ruthie and her two sisters, Shirley and Lillian, managed all of their care facility, taking on leadership roles that were unheard of for women at the time.
Sam, their father did the laundry. Sophie, their mother was the cook. Lillian was the bookkeeper, and Ruthie and Shirley were the two nurses, which was a very unique thing. At that point, most nursing facilities employed nursing assistants with approximately 6 months of training. Having two Registered Nurses on staff and directing care was unheard of. It was here that they started to change the face of long-term care. Small changes came first when they focused on helping their patients wear street clothes every day. Larger changes came when, at ages 21 and 22, Shirley and Ruthie managed to have a doctor visit the nursing home to serve indigent patients. This was the first time this happened in Miami.

The innovations continued. Ruthie and Shirley ensured that their patients had regular access to observe their religious beliefs. This Orthodox Jewish family set up Baptist, Catholic and Jewish programming. They even held a Christmas celebration for their indigent patients, unheard of at the time.

Two years after opening The Rock, the family decided to sell it and Ruthie went to work for Jackson Memorial Hospital. It was in 1950 that she was pulled over by a police officer named Jack Kessler for not hand signaling as she made a turn into the hospital. One year later they were married. A year later they opened the Southern Convalescent Home. Ruthie worked there part-time at first, while maintaining her role at Jackson Memorial Hospital; however by 1954, she was working full-time at the Southern Convalescent Home.

It was here that Ruthie and Shirley began training Black women who had applied for positions as cleaning ladies or cooks for the role of Nursing Assistant. In order to support them, they not only offered the training, but also forbid any racism directed at them by patients, colleagues or families. Patients who refused care from a Black person or could not be respectful were asked to leave.

In 1953, Florida’s first law providing for licensing of nursing and boarding homes went into effect, and in 1955 Southern Convalescent was visited for the first time by an inspection team. The team was so impressed with their charting medications that they made it the new standard of care. Furthering that along, Ruthie and Shirley mandated in-service trainings long before continuing education was required for their staff members.

It was when Medicare came into being that they opened a second home, The Towne House for Convalescents. They had started a standard of excellence in ensuring their patients had access to social activities including outings, religious observations and fun experiences at their previous facilities, and found it important to the mental health of their patients. At the Towne House, they invested in further innovation, introducing additional social activities, bringing in hairdressers and creating a cafeteria-style dining room at the Towne House, offering their patients greater self-selection and even providing a dietician to design healthier meals.
Shortly thereafter in 1973, they sold the nursing homes, and Ruthie became the Director of Nursing at the Floridian, a nursing and rehab center. At this point, she had been a nurse for 26 years. She continued in that role until 1981, when Ruthie and Shirley started their own business again. This time, they created new software that they used to digitize the medical records for nursing homes. The technological innovation ensured better care for their patients and was reminiscent of the days when they had pinned handwritten notes and charts to their patients’ shirts when they were sent for medical care in the year before they first convinced doctors to start rounding on their patients on-site. It wasn’t until 1991 that they sold this business, and Ruthie then retired.

As we look back on the career of Ruthie Kessler, it was always deeply rooted in family and the connection with her sisters, Shirley and Lillian, cannot be overlooked. Everything they worked for, they worked for together. This was especially true for Shirley and Ruthie, who built their careers together and led their family in changing the field of long-term care as they combatted the health inequities of their time.

Above all else, Ruthie Kessler is a nurse. Despite retiring over 30 years ago, she has maintained her license making her the longest licensed nurse in at least the state of Florida, but it goes beyond this.

Nurses care, and Ruthie cared about more than just her patients. She cared about driving forward equity and equality, bringing her expertise in caring for people to it naturally.

It is in recognition of all the good that Ruthie Gitlen Kessler accomplished in her extraordinary career and in appreciation for her exemplary demonstration of the power that nurses have to heal and transform lives, that the Board of Directors of the Nursing Consortium of Florida, in collaboration with The DAISY Foundation™ and the John A. Hartford Foundation, has deemed it appropriate to recognize Ruth Gitlen Kessler, RN with its first-ever DAISY Lifetime Achievement Award.