Alumni Profile: Rita (Seeger) Jablonski ’86

Alumni Profile

Finding Direction at Holy Family University

Earlier this year, Dr. Rita (Seeger) Jablonski ’86, PhD, CRNP, FAAN, FGSA was honored byGeriatric Nursing, a peer-reviewed healthcare journal, by being named as a Leader and Innovator in the field. She has also been named a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Academy of Nursing, among other awards and honors. While she is currently based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing, the native of Fox Chase, Philadelphia began her journey as a nursing student at Holy Family.

“Holy Family had a really good reputation,” Jablonski says, “And that was important to me because I was the first person in my family to go to college.” But Jablonski’s interest in elder care did not just result from her schoolwork. As she was pursuing her degree, she was also working as a nursing assistant in a nursing home.

“It was one of the best jobs I ever had,” she recalls. “I really liked working with people who had dementia. I found the whole disease fascinating, and we knew very little about it in the 1980s.”

After graduating from Holy Family University, Jablonski earned her MSN degree from La Salle University and her Post-Master’s Certificate Adult Primary Care Nurse Practitioner from the University of Pennsylvania. During that period, she returned to Holy Family University as an instructor. Her current role is Director of

Nursing School of Credit: UAB Photo

Research and Scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In addition to assisting others at her institution, she has received grants for her own research, including a $1.6 million grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide oral hygiene training to caregivers in local nursing homes to improve the quality of care for residents with dementia.

Jablonski is particularly proud of her work in this area. “That was a gamechanger. I demonstrated with two studies that you can deliver mouth care for people with dementia who refuse care by modifying the approach. You don’t need to give them drugs or be forceful. Those strategies that I used in nursing homes then became strategies that I adapted in the outpatient setting in my role as a nurse practitioner.”

For new students in the Holy Family University nursing program, Jablonski advises taking time to decide what direction to take one’s career. I thought as a nursing student I would go to four years of nursing school, work in ICU for a year or two, and then become a nurse anesthetist. Well, the joke was on me — what anesthetists do is extremely important, but it was not the right fit for me. I never thought I would enjoy psych, but I loved it — especially geriatrics psych.”

Nursing of Credit: UAB School Photo

Dr. Rita Jablonski with the UAB School of Nursing leading a dementia bootcamp