Ex-Nurse Gets Top Capitol Aide Job Held by a Woman

A 35-year-old Californian who originally set out on a career in nursing has been appointed chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.)--believed to be the highest congressional staff position ever held by a woman.

“I never thought of myself as anything but a nurse,” Sheila P. Burke, a native of San Francisco, recalled shortly after her appointment was announced late last month.

But in 1979, Burke, who had been working for the National Student Nursing Assn. in New York, heard that Dole was looking for an aide to help deal with the health care issues that confronted him as the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. The one-time staff nurse for a Berkeley hospital said she saw the career switch as a temporary one.

“It seemed like a tremendous opportunity, and one I ought to try. It was all very different from what I had done,” she said. “I didn’t think I would do it for a long period of time, but I thought it would be a tremendous experience.”

Her main goal, she said, was bringing her nursing perspective to health care policy-making.

“There are people, I think, who don’t appreciate the implications of policy on the delivery of services,” she said.

Known as quiet and thorough and showing a keen understanding of the complexities of the Medicare and Medicaid programs overseen by the committee, Burke quickly established herself on the staff, and her responsibilities expanded.

Dole, who became Finance Committee chairman when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981, made her the committee’s deputy staff director in 1982 and gave her the same position on his new staff when he was elected majority leader in 1984.

Meanwhile, Burke did not lose touch with medicine. She is a member of the adjunct faculties of the Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania schools of nursing.

Despite her broader responsibilities, she also has had to call upon her nursing background in working for the majority leader. Last August, when Dole’s motorcade was speeding through Peking en route to an official tour of China’s Great Wall, a van carrying the group’s Chinese interpreters and guides was struck head-on by an army truck.

Burke jumped out of the van in which she was riding and began treating the severely injured Chinese on the scene.

Dole aide Walt Riker recalled: “She started making tourniquets out of shirts and seat covers,” and even improvised a splint for the van driver, whose leg had been fractured when he was thrown through the windshield.

Capitol historians said they could not recall any other woman holding a staff position of equal rank with Burke’s new job. Just last year, however, another woman broke the gender barrier when Jo-Anne L. Coe was named Senate secretary, becoming the Senate’s first female officer.

Burke said she believes the step up to chief of staff will be less traumatic than her shift from the Finance Committee to the politically charged atmosphere of the majority leader’s office. But, she added, “really, until it gets into full speed, it’s hard to tell.”

In her new job, she not only will oversee Dole’s staff but also will serve as his chief trouble-shooter, tracking the concerns of individual senators, helping develop a schedule for legislation to reach the Senate floor and keeping an eye on the work being done by almost two dozen Senate committees.