Although she lived much of her life in Vancouver, JoAnn Perry was always a New Yorker! Her entry into nursing was a BSN Degree from Adelphi University, Garden City New York, in 1965.
March 12, 2025
On graduation, JoAnn began working at New York Hospital’s Cornell Medical Center, first as a general staff nurse, then as a senior staff nurse, before being promoted to the role of Clinical Nurse Specialist in Respiratory Care – a position she held from 1968 to 1972. In 1972, she crossed the country, landing in Vancouver where she took up a Respiratory Clinical Specialist position at St Paul’s Hospital.
The desire to continue learning led her into graduate studies, enrolling in the UBC School of Nursing’s MSN degree program. During that program she encountered a professor who inspired the remainder of her career. Dr. Mary Cruise, who later relocated to California in nursing leadership roles, nurtured her interest in gerontology until it became something of a passion, and also suggested that JoAnn “might be surprised at how much she would like teaching.” Inspired by that vision, on graduation with her MSN in 1976, JoAnn immediately accepted a position in the School as an Assistant Professor, and was awarded tenure in 1981.
JoAnn joined a teaching team whose members became close colleagues and friends for life. One of her special contributions was to develop 4th year undergraduate gerontology courses both for on campus and for distance delivery. In the MSN program, she developed the basic course on clinical specialization, as well as the course for specialization in gerontology. Both clinical courses gave her the opportunity to maintain and develop expert clinical skills and to involve students at both levels in her own work with the elderly.
In the 1990s, JoAnn was able to obtain a Special Educational Leave from her position to attend the University of Washington School of Nursing. Her dissertation research was on family caregiving in the context of dementia, and she graduated with the PhD in 1996. The quality of that dissertation work was recognized with the prestigious Carol A. Lindamen New Researcher Award, from the Western Institute for Nursing (US).
Returning to the her faculty position at UBC, JoAnn developed the critical thinking and nursing theory course for the recently revised masters program. She continued to teach this course over the next decade, placing considerable emphasis on the theory-practice relationship. Her enormous fund of knowledge, unfailing quick wit, sparkling personality and high expectations for critical thinking made her as well loved in the classroom as she was throughout the academy and community.
JoAnn also became involved in the development of an interdisciplinary teaching and research unit, overseen by the Vancouver General Hospital and located in the Purdy Pavilion Extended Care Unit on campus. The idea behind that unit was that it would offer dementia care from early onset through palliative care, with a caregiving centre that offers education and support for family members. Her proposal to VGH was that it would convert one 250 bed long term care facility into this dementia unit, with the UBC School of Nursing responsible for developing the caregiver support programs. In the spring of 2000, the 4th floor of Purdy Pavilion opened as an Interdisciplinary Teaching and Research Unit.
JoAnn’s research and scholarly activity, which had been productive even before she completed the PhD was accelerated following. She developed and analyzed an instrument to measure older women’s health, facilitating comparison of caregiving women with noncaregiving women in the general population. She also conducted funded research with populations that might have special caregiving concerns in the dementia context, including a key study on Japanese Canadians. JoAnn’s work challenged the strong tradition of only viewing caregiving as a burden. The research findings from her family studies guided the development and testing of an intervention program, and she built a strong interdisciplinary team (social work and rehabilitation sciences) to work collaboratively on this initiative. She also worked with a group of faculty in the School of Nursing to develop and implement the concept of ‘cultural safety’ to enrich the caregiving research and make it as relevant as possible. Her vision was that this would fill an important gap in knowledge about caregiving to older adults that reflected the cultural diversity of the Canadian population.
Beyond the family caregivers, JoAnn also developed important innovations for the person with dementia.She created a means for coding videotapes of nurse patient interaction, and co-led a socialization group for older women with advanced dementia for 1 hour each week. She involved students in observation and analysis of those videotaped groups and, on the basis of pilot findings, developed a funded intervention called “Culture Tales” to facilitate reminiscing for cognitively impaired older adults who are from a different culture than the persons who provide their care.
JoAnn was always actively engaged in university and community activities. She represented the Faculty of Applied Science on the University Senate for several years, and served on the Advisory Board for the UBC Women’s Resource Centre in developing their Counselling and Working with an Aging Population Certificate Program. In the wider community, she gave of her time and expertise to the Alzheimer Society of BC Research Policy Committee, and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Caregivers Association of BC.
JoAnn retired in 2008 as Associate Professor Emeritus, enjoying a renewed freedom to engage in cultural and community social activities. She also remained actively involved in a number of key activities that capitalized on her expertise, including collaborative research and scholarly writing. Her most recent scholarly publication in 2015 was on “Verbal and nonverbal indicators of quality of communication between care staff and residents in ethnoculturally and linguistically diverse long-term care settings,” published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10823-015-9269-6
In 2019, when the School celebrated 100 years of delivering degree programs in nursing, JoAnn was delighted to be recognized with a Centenary Medal. She wrote at that time “To receive this Medal is indeed an honour, and when considering all of the opportunities and experiences that being a part of the school has afforded me, I want to thank the School not only for awarding me this medal of distinction, but for my career opportunities and the many, many friendships that emerged and grew over my years at UBC.”
JoAnn died peacefully on March 2nd, 2025 in Vancouver. She was supported in her final illness by family and friends, including several of her close faculty emeritus colleagues. Her enormous contributions to advancing person and family-centred knowledge in dementia care, and to making gerontology among the most exciting of nursing specializations at the School of Nursing, will long be remembered.
