She was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal by the International Red Cross Society for her contributions.

She attended Savanna High School in Savanna, Illinois, studied literature at Northwestern University, and earned her registered nurse degree at the Illinois Training School for Nurses in Chicago, in 1895.

[7] She went to Bulgaria to help establish and lead a nurses' training school there, at the invitation of the Tsaritsa, Eleonore Reuss of Köstritz.

In 1920 she succeeded Alice Fitzgerald in Paris as Chief Nurse of the Red Cross Commission in Europe.

[16] Helen Scott Hay returned to the United States in 1922, to care for an ailing brother.