Upon receiving her 5-year nursing junior college education from Fooyin University in Taiwan, Kuei-Min knew she wanted to further her education in graduate school but didn’t have her heart set on a specialty. At the time, Fooyin University lacked instructors in the gerontological nursing field, and they needed someone to take on this specialty so they could help teach it. So, the university reached out to Kuei-Min to ask if she was willing to pursue the field of gerontological nursing, given that they would provide a scholarship for her at the University of Minnesota to do so. She obliged, and since then, she’s never looked back.

“Through these years of working with older adults and involving in long-term care policy development, I am so fortunate to realize that this field is where I belong,” Kuei-Min said. “I have no regrets since then.”

After earning her MS in gerontological nursing in 1996, Kuei-Min went back to Fooyin University, where she taught for 1 1/2 years as a lecturer until she was offered another scholarship to return to the University of Minnesota to receive her PhD. She returned to Fooyin in 2000 and worked as an associate professor until 2007, when she was promoted to full professor. 

At 34 years old, Kuei-Min became the youngest nursing professor in the history of nursing in Taiwan. She later went on to be the first nurse researcher to be appointed as the Chair of Nursing Research Field by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

This was just the beginning.

In 2010, she was recruited by the Dean of the College of Nursing and the President of Kaohsiung Medical University, where she established the first master’s degree program of long-term care in aging in southern Taiwan and a university-level research center named the Center for Long-term Care Research. 

“My academic career has always been involved with administration, teaching, and research,” Kuei-Min said. “I treated each task as a learning experience, and these experiences make me grow and build up my capacity.”

Now, Kuei-Min uses her education, experiences, and research far beyond the classroom. She has established and led an interdisciplinary research team to develop six different exercise programs to promote the health of older adults. These programs consist of: 

Kuei-Min has trained more than 300 volunteers to serve as exercise instructors for these six programs, which have been actively and widely promoted and practiced in more than 200 community care centers and 20 long-term care facilities in southern Taiwan. 

Over 900 older adults have experienced improved health and function as a result of participation.

Kuei-Min personally trains some of the middle-aged volunteers to become certified instructors. Though the exercise programs aren’t designed for them, even the trainers experience benefits from their participation in the program.

Not only does Kuei-Min actively promote the health of older adults, but she takes a stand for it, too. She is consistently involved in long-term care policymaking on healthcare delivery for older adults in private and governmental agencies in Taiwan and serves as a professional consultant for public sectors. In this role, she has helped develop the 10-Year Long-Term Care Plan, a nationally implemented program affecting more than 3.1 million older adults in Taiwan. 

Kuei-Min has dedicated her entire career to helping the older population, and she can see her work paying off. She’s helped provide rehabilitation services to 12,000 older adults with disabilities, helped improve the care quality of 160 long-term care facilities, facilitated an “aging-friendly city” for 420,000 older adults, and raised the awareness of 2.8 million residents of Kaohsiung City to the issues on aging and long-term care. 

“The most rewarding [part] about the work I do is that I can make a small contribution and difference to this aging society based on my expertise,” Kuei-Min said. 

Gerontology may not have been where she saw her nursing career taking her, but it’s where she belonged. The impact she’s made in Taiwan is evidence of that.