Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield (born August 12, 1954) is an American nurse and health care administrator, who served in the Obama administration as acting United States Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2015 to 2017, and as head of the Health Resources and Services Administration from 2009 to 2015.

Education Wakefield was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, in 1954.

Career Wakefield worked as a full or part-time nurse, primarily in medical surgical units and intensive care, from 1976 to 1985, and taught nursing from 1977 to 1987 at the University of North Dakota (UND). she worked for a month as a consultant for the Global Programme on AIDS at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, then took the position of chief of staff for Senator Kent Conrad, which she held until 1996. Her Senate duties included co-chairing the Senate Rural Health Caucus Staff Organization with Sheila Burke, who was also a nurse and was chief of staff for Senator Bob Dole, from 1987 to 1992.

In 1996 she returned to academia and served as professor and director of the Center for Health Policy, Research, and Ethics at George Mason University. ), a HRSA-funded source of information on rural health and social services for researchers, policymakers, program managers, project officers and the general public.

In November 2020, Wakefield was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Obama Administration Wakefield was named administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) by President Barack Obama in February 2009. The agency has a budget of $7.5 billion agency that distributes funding across some 3,000 grants spanning 80 programs, and received an additional $2.5B under the Affordable Care Act.

As the administrator of HRSA, she oversaw the approximately 1,100 federally supported community care clinics that serve people without health insurance or who are under-insured; she oversaw the disbursement of $150 million in funding to those clinics under the Affordable Care Act to help people enroll in the program, and another $250 million in competitive grant funding to build new community care clinics and increase services. She also administered the disbursement of $55.5 million in grants to increase the nurse and dentistry workforces.

Deputy Secretary

Wakefield began serving as acting Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services in April 2015, after the resignation of Bill Corr, and on July 9, 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Wakefield to that job permanently. On July 13, 2015, her nomination was sent to the United States Senate, and she received a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Finance on February 4, 2016. Ultimately, however, her nomination was stalled in the Senate and she was never confirmed, due to disputes over abortion between Republican Senators and the Department of Health and Human Services, which had nothing to do with Wakefield personally. Her term as acting deputy secretary ended on January 20, 2017, and she returned to North Dakota. and chaired the committee that produced the 2005 report Quality Through Collaboration: The Future of Rural Health Care (2005).

In addition, she was a member of President Clinton's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry from 1997 to 1998, and was appointed a member of the National Advisory Committee to HRSA's Office of Rural Health Policy in 1999.

Honors Wakefield is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2004.