Meridean Maas

Maas worked as a nurse in Chicago while her husband was in graduate school there, and was Director of Nursing at the Evangelical Hospital and School of Nursing in her hometown. As a consultant at the Iowa Soldiers Home in 1965, she worked with Ada Jacox and they co-wrote a textbook, Guidelines for Nurse Autonomy/Patient Welfare (1977).^[4] In 1969, she became the first nurse to serve on the Iowa Board of Health. She became a professor of nursing at the University of Iowa in 1983.^[1] She was co-director of the John A. Hartford Center for Geriatric Nursing Excellence, and of the Gerontological Nursing Interventions Research Center (GNIRC).^[2][5]

She was first author on the textbook Nursing Diagnoses and Interventions for the Elderly (1991), revised as Nursing Care of Older Adults: Diagnoses, Outcomes & Interventions (2001).^[6][7] She served on several editorial boards of journals in her field.^[2] Her research in gerontological nursing^[8][9][10] often involved studies of institutional and family care for patients with Alzheimer's disease,^[1] and was published in journals including The American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias,^[11] Journal of Nursing Measurement,^[12] Journal of Gerontological Nursing,^[13] and Nursing Outlook.^[14]

Maas and another University of Iowa nursing professor, Janet Specht, owned Liberty Country Living, a nursing home in North Liberty, Iowa.^[15] Liberty Country Living opened in 1998 and was used as a nurse training site until it closed in 2003.^[16] In 2006, Maas and Specht were the first recipients of the Edge Runners Award from the American Academy of Nursing.^[17] In 2011, she was named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing.^[18]

Meridean Speas married optometrist Richard Rolland Maas in 1954. They had three children. Her husband died from pancreatic cancer in April 2020,^[19] and she died in November 2020, aged 86 years, at her home in Iowa City, Iowa.^[1] The Mennonite College of Nursing at Illinois State University has a Dr. Meridean Maas Faculty Research Mentor Award, named in her honor.^[20]