Sarah Ailey, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Community, Systems, and Mental Health Nursing at Rush University, Chicago, IL. Her research and scholarly practice are concentrated on improving the lives of people with disabilities, in particular intellectual disabilities, by translating research into practice within community and inpatient hospital settings. Ailey is the Principal Investigator for two federally funded programs. With a five year grant from the Administration for Community Living, the five core partners of the PATH-PWIDD (Partnering with Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities to Improve Health Outcomes) Program are building a National Cross-Sector Consortium to address the lack of content about individuals with ID/DD in current interprofessional health education curriculum. The five core partners are Rush University, St. John Fisher Golisano Institute for Developmental Disability Nursing,The University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Minnesota Institute on Community Integration, and Villanova University. Through an R01 grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute, Ailey is currently investigating the effect of the Steps to Effective Problem-solving (STEPS) program in group homes. She, along with Molly Bathje and Tamar Heller, were funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to hold the PATH-PWD (Partnering to Transform Healthcare with People with Disabilities) Conference in 2017, with additional funding from the Working for Transformative Healthcare (WITH) Foundation to bring self-advocates with disabilities to the conference and to provide pre-conference training in conference advocacy prior to the conference. Following that conference, with funding from the WITH Foundation, Ailey and Bathje produced a documentary None of us Want to Stand Still, which is available on the AHRQ Priority Populations Resources page of its website. She has been the advisor and/or content by translating research into practice within community and inpatient hospital settings expert for more than 40 PhD, DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) and MSN (Master of Science in Nursing) students on projects related to the care of people with disabilities, mostly related to intellectual disabilities.
Along with Beth Marks she was an author of the White Paper on Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Nursing Educational Programs for the California Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities (CCEPD). Ailey has been on the Board of the Alliance for Disability in Healthcare Education since 2015 and has been the President since 2018.
