Dr. Claudia M. Smith is a community/public health nurse, educator and consultant. She earned her BS in Nursing from the University of Maryland and worked for a local health department as a Public Health Nurse and Supervisor. She earned her MPH with a major in Public Health Nursing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She then joined the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore where she taught public health nursing for 40 years, including clinical supervision of baccalaureate nursing students in public health nursing throughout the state of Maryland. She has a PhD in Education from College Park.
She is the author and editor of five editions of the award-winning text book: Community/Public Health Nursing Practice. She has consulted on public health nursing curriculum with the University of Mississippi and the Medical College of Virginia School of Nursing. Most recently she served on the American Nurses’ Association workgroup to update the Public Health Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice (2022).
After her husband acquired a disability from workplace exposures to chemicals, Claudia became interested in environmental health. At the University of Maryland, she was director of a Healthy Homes Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that demonstrated that lead, asthma triggers, and carbon monoxide could be reduced in occupied homes.
In 2016, she co-edited the first ever text on environment health and nursing, an award-winning, open access textbook published on line by the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, an international non-profit founded at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. (See https://envirn.org/e-textbook/ )
Since moving to a Continuing Care Retirement Community in December of 2021, she serves on the Health Services Committee where she is Vice-chair and is a consultant to the ABLE Committee regarding multiple chemical sensitivity and indoor air quality.