BANGOR – Dorothy Hill, chief executive officer and chief nursing officer at Acadia Hospital, has been named Nurse of the Year by the American Psychiatric Nurses Association. The award was made at the association’s annual meeting, held at the beginning of October in Atlanta.

The association’s Nurse of the Year award “recognizes a member who demonstrates vision, perseverance, dedication, initiative and facilitation in the delivery of mental health services to individuals, families and their communities,” according to the association’s Web site.

Hill has served as CNO at Acadia since it opened in 1992, and was named CEO in 2002. This summer, Acadia became the first psychiatric hospital in the nation to be named a Magnet Hospital by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, a recognition given for a hospital’s commitment to nursing excellence and providing a professional work environment for nurses.

In an interview Friday morning, the 56-year-old Hill said she has been dedicated to the specialty of psychiatric nursing throughout her career, in part because “it means taking care of the whole person … mind, body and spirit.”

The understanding of mental illness has become more “biological” as research finds chemical, genetic and metabolic links to different conditions, Hill said, and psychoactive medications have assumed a more central role.

“It’s not a guessing game any more,” she said.

Still, Hill said, mental health can only be fully restored and maintained by understanding humans in relationship to each other and their environments. Psychiatric nurses, she said, must be attuned to the complex needs of their patients, and not as task-oriented as their counterparts’ more general medical settings.

Hill has been praised for her success in recruiting and retaining professional nurses at a time when other facilities are scrambling for staff. She attributes Acadia’s low turnover rate to maintaining a high nurse-to-patient ratio and a professional environment that expects nurses to develop their expertise and contribute to patient care at a high level.

She said she’ll probably vote in favor of the casino gambling measure in next week’s referendum because she supports the jobs it will bring, as well as the idea of more money being spent in Maine.

“People are concerned that Maine will develop problems with gambling addiction and drug and alcohol addictions,” she said. “But those problems are already here, because of poverty and other factors.”

She’s also outspoken on the recent administrative problems within the state’s public mental health hospitals in Augusta and Bangor.

“It’s time for the state to get out of the business,” she said. “They only have a few patients. It’s been demonstrated that [private hospitals] can provide effective care and treatment for less money. To me, it’s a no-brainer.”