Guardian of the Discipline
In Memoriam
Contributors: John Nelson, Dan Pesut, and Connie Delaney
Marie Ellen Manthey was born in Chicago, IL on July 17th, 1935. She passed away at home on December 12, 2024. She is survived by her son Mark and daughter Claire. She leaves behind one granddaughter, a niece and two nephews. Marie received many honors throughout her life that were in some way related to her pioneering of the model of care, Primary Nursing, and how it was integrated into the framework of care Relationship Based Care. She founded a company to consult in professional care delivery.
Healthcare is a relational industry, and several nurse leaders developed models of nursing care to promote the one-to-one relationship between patient and nurse as a way to improve the care through relationship, which improved understanding of needs in and response to care (Nelson, 2000). It wasn’t until Marie Manthey developed the relational method of nursing called Primary Nursing (Manthey, 1980, 2001) at the University of Minnesota that the relationship between nurse and patient became an important element to develop care and the care plan with the patient and care team by an identified Primary Nurse from admission to discharge from the care unit. More detail about the historical timeline of Marie is available on the University of Minnesota website.
A full historical review of Marie, including the transcript from an interview of Marie is available from the University of Minnesota history website. But the highlights of her relationship with the University of Minnesota was her implementation of Primary Nursing when she was Head Nurse on Unit 32 at the University of Minnesota when she was Head Nurse. Her work at the University of Minnesota was impactful and subsequently she was honored with an Endowed Professorship to challenge new professors to help with innovation and change in healthcare. She also received an Outstanding Achievement Award as the highest award given for University of Minnesota alumni for her work in Primary Nursing. Marie received both her bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Minnesota.
Marie worked with several leaders in Primary Nursing to define primary nursing and help develop an assessment of primary nursing as a central component of nurse job satisfaction (Nelson, 2001). Leaders who wrote about and were champions of the Primary Nurse model who Marie worked with to develop the assessment included Karen Zander who wrote Primary Nursing (1980) and used the model in community care, Joyce Clifford and Kathy Horvath who wrote Advancing Professional Nursing Practice (1990) and led nursing care at Beth Israel hospital in Boston, and Luther Christman who had a similar relational model of care referred to as Nurse-Physician Team Management (Christman, 1965) and led the nursing services at Rush University in Chicago.
There have been a few large research studies to study the impact of Primary nursing, including a systematic review of Primary nursing that was conducted by Goncalves et al. in 2023. A study of over 6,000 nurses revealed primary nursing is a central factor of nurse job satisfaction and nurse work wellbeing (Nelson et al., 2021, 2022). In the largest multi-national study on nurse work wellbeing, it has been found across 15 countries that primary nursing improves nurse job satisfaction and relates to improving retention of nurses (Nelson et al., 2025).
Marie began a company called Creative Nursing Management in 1978 to consult on Primary Nursing and help others to implement this model of professional nursing that leveraged the relationship to enhance the care and experience of care for both the patient and nurse. Marie’s concept of Primary Nursing held the nurse to be responsible for care, have authority within the organization to operate as a professional nurse, and to be held accountable for professional nursing care as a Primary Nurse. Eventually the company’s name was changed to Creative Health Care Management which is still teaching Primary Nursing around the world. Through her work she has influenced generations of nurses and supported the development of nursing in more than 2,000 client health care organizations around the world.
Marie wrote the Practice of Primary Nursing in 1980 with a second edition in 2002. The book on Relationship Based Care provides a comprehensive framework of care to reviews how to implement systems that support the model of care, Primary Nursing (Koloroutis, 2004). She and those from her company have also written or co-written several other books, chapter, and articles that support Primary Nursing and Relationship Based Care.
She was the founding editor of Creative Nursing, a peer-reviewed journal in its fourth decade of publication, and she co-founded the Nurses Peer Support Network, which provides support for nurses working toward sobriety and re-entry into the nursing workforce. She was an avid member of the School of Nursing Heritage Committee, ensuring future generations appreciate the University of Minnesota’s impact on nursing.
In 1994, Marie became the fourth American nurse elected a fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in the United Kingdom. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 1998. In 2015, she was named a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing – its highest distinction – for extraordinary contributions to the nursing profession, sustained over the course of a career. Manthey received an honorary degree from the University of Minnesota in 1999, the first from the School of Nursing.
Two videos of Marie speaking about primary nursing:
- A 3-minute video that reviews primary nursing as told by Marie Manthey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr7t8E5MMoM
- A 56-minutes interview of Marie Manthey about Primary Nursing. Conducted by Dr. John Nelson who has conducted years of research in Primary Nursing: https://youtu.be/_Df_t8fjuVE?si=eriWxEC7CWLWq1hn
Video of Marie speaking about her nursing career
- A 26-minute interview of Marie Manthey recorded at the Summit of Sages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QooEUjumcWc
Other Passions of Marie Manthey:
- Sobriety support for nurses recovering from dependency on alcohol
- Musings blog that Marie shared her recent thoughts and nurses could reflect.
- Salons to have a place for nurses and non-nurses to gather to share food and conversation about nursing, healthcare, or topics of interest of the time.
Other tributes to Marie
- Living Legend induction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBcA4I7eUOw
- Obituary in Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Obituary in Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois
- Facebook page of Creative Health Care Management, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Additional information about Marie
Sources
Christman, L. (1965). Nurse-physician communication in the hospital. JAMA, 194, 151-156. doi:10.1001/jama.1965.03090180063015
Clifford, J. C., & Horvath, K. J. (1990). Advancing the practice of professional nursing. New York: Springer Publishing.
Gonçalves, I., Mendes, D. A., Caldeira, S., Jesus, É., & Nunes, E. (2023). The Primary Nursing Care Model and Inpatients’ Nursing-Sensitive Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of Quantitative Studies. Int J Environ Res Public Health, 20(3). doi:10.3390/ijerph20032391
Koloroutis, M. (2004). Relationship-based care: A model for transforming practice: Creative Health Care Management.
Manthey, M. (1980). The practice of primary nursing. Boston: Blackwell.
Manthey, M. (2002). The Practice of Primary Nursing, 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: Creative Health Care Management.
Nelson, J. W. (2001). A professional nursing care model and satisfaction of the staff nurse. (Masters). University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Nelson, J. W. (2000). Models of nursing care: a century of vacillation. Journal of Nursing Administration, 30(4), 156,184. doi:10.1097/00005110-200004000-00001
Nelson, J. W., Vrbnjak, D., Thomas, P., & Schwartz, C. I. (In Press). Deepening empirical understandings of nurse work wellbeing: Using mixed methods including path analysis to create contextualized outcome models. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing.
Nelson, J. W., Milutinović, D., Kasimovskaya, N., SİS ÇELİK, A., KILIÇ, D., Gözüm, S., & Vrbnjak, D. (2022). The Profile of Caring: An internationally tested model to assess and support nurses during pandemic. Creative Nursing, 28(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1891/CN-2021-0069
Nelson, J., Thomas, P., Cato, D., Gozum, S., Oja, K., Williamson, T., . . . Vrbnjaak, D. (2021). Testing an international model of nurse job satisfaction to support the quadruple aim. In J. W. Nelson, J. Felgen, & M. A. Hozak (Eds.), Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Healthcare Outcomes (pp. 217-236). Hoboken: Wiley.
Zander, K. (1980). Primary nursing, development and management. Germantown: Aspen.
About the Contributors
John Nelson, PhD, MS, RN, is Founder and Owner of Healthcare Environment (HCE), a HIPAA compliant international data management company. Over the last 24 years he has led two international research collaboratives to study factors of nurse work wellbeing. The most recent active collaborative is the Caring Science International Collaborative which is a DBA (Doing Business As) within HCE. Compilations of some of this work can be found in two books he co-edited, Measuring Caring in 2011 and AJN book of the year in 2021 Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Healthcare Outcomes.
Daniel J. Pesut PhD RN FAAN is a nurse educator, academic, researcher, consultant, and coach. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and Emeritus Katherine R. and C. Walton Lillehei Chair in Nursing Leadership at University of Minnesota. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Nursing at Indiana University School of Nursing. He has a long-standing commitment to creativity and innovation in nursing education, futures thinking, and foresight leadership development in nursing and health care.
Steve Rudolph. is the Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing where he connects the school and its stakeholders through authentic storytelling and compelling content. He serves on the steering committee of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s Nursing Advancement Professionals group and chairs its communication committee. Steve joined the School of Nursing from the Carlson School of Management where he led the creation of the business school’s external communications and ground-breaking digital and video content.
Connie White Delaney PhD RN FAAN serves as Professor & Dean, School of Nursing, University of Minnesota, and serves as Core Faculty in the Institute for Health Informatics. She is an active researcher, informatics and information technology author, and national and global presenter in data and information technology standards for nursing and health care, and big data knowledge discovery. Her most recent book “Leading with Love” describes a leader who marries compassion with computational power on the journey of transformation and connection. She holds a BSN with majors in nursing and mathematics, MA in Nursing, Ph.D. Educational Administration and Computer Applications.
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