Elizabeth Ann Taylor Fleming (MSN ’70)

From the age of five Ann knew she wanted to be a nurse. She remembers loving being in the infirmary at summer camp, cleaning up and wanting to help look after the patients there. Several years later, Ann was one of the first six students enrolled in the master’s program at the SoN in 1968, and one of three who graduated in 1970. She was the only student who chose the administration stream. She recalled meeting, as “a lonely little petunia”, every Monday afternoon for three hours with two senior professors, Margaret Street and Maude Dolphin. She also recalled studying statistics in the time before calculators were widely used and accepted. “That was torture. We would sit on the phone at night and compare our additions and divisions.” She remembers telling Miss Street: “You do realize that if you don’t pass me in this course, you are going to have a 100% failure rate in the first MSN course in nursing administration!” She found the nursing faculty harder on the first class of students than probably was necessary or fair. “It was almost like, because it was women, because it was nursing, and because it was new, we had to be twice as good and go through twice as many hoops as almost any other graduate program on campus.”

After obtaining her MSN, Ann worked for two years at VGH as the Executive Assistant to Mary Richmond, the Director of Nursing there at the time. From 1972 to 1976 she was the Director of Nursing at a Health Unit in Toronto and in 1976 was lured back to Vancouver for two years as the Executive Assistant Director of the RNABC. For the next ten years she worked as a public health administrator in Vancouver and finally, worked as a nurse consultant for five years before falling in love and getting married. Ann moved to London, Ontario in 1993 and continues to live there with her husband Bill. Their two daughters live in Korea and Vancouver.

Ann is very involved in her local community, volunteering in several non-profit agencies including the London Community Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Society and the YMCA. She was a member of the Board of St. Joseph’s Health Care London for seven years, including acting as the Board Chair.

In her spare time she plays bridge and golf, (sort of!), and she and Bill have had great vacations in several different parts of the world. However it is fair to say that Vancouver has a special place in her heart!