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Newsletters April 30, 2024

Preparing Healthcare Providers to Meet the Social Mission of Nursing

Newsletter sent April 30, 2024, written by Dr. Brigit Carter.

Greetings Social Mission Alliance Allies!

My name is Brigit Carter and I have been invited to be the Guest Editor for the April 2024 issue of the Social Mission Alliance newsletter. I am drawn in not only by the mission and vision of the Social Mission Alliance, but also by a very personal connection that has forever shaped my path as a health care provider.

a group of people posing in front of a milken institute school of public health

I was fortunate to be accepted into the first cohort of the Leaders for Health Equity (2017) (now Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity) where I was introduced to my forever mentor, in life and death, Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan. Fitz defined social mission as the “contributions of a school in its mission, curriculum, programs, and the performance of its graduates, faculty, and leadership to enhance health equity and address the health disparities of the community in which it exists,” which could be used as a metric to guide institutions in mitigating health disparities (Mullan, 2017, p.122).

To strengthen healthcare access and quality, nursing students and professionals are being called on to meet the needs of their communities in new and different ways that amplify the concern for healthcare disparities and address critical issues that are present in all communities and in all societies (Wyatt et al., 2016). Nurses should be cognizant of the societal factors that limit health outcomes and recognize that it is not enough to just meet the needs of patients at the point of care.

With the latest attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice, the most dangerous outcome is the inability to educate future and current providers on historic and present barriers as well as identifying strategies which allow us to achieve equity in health care.

In this issue, we will provide some important highlights from the 2024 Social Mission Alliance Conference co-hosted by Duke University School of Nursing in Durham, North Carolina that provide a historical perspective and relevant strategies to improve health equity.

Conference Highlights

Debra Farrington stands at a podium giving a speech and gesturing to the left

Debra Farrington

“Why else do we choose to amplify equity? Because I’m tired of losing people I love. Too many who suffer significant diseases don’t get adequate treatment and make difficult end of life choices.”

Victor Dzau

“It takes everybody to move these things forward, not one profession or the other one, and certainly takes well beyond the health sector to address the many equity issues that we care about in health…So don’t lose your passion. Stick with it, lean into it. And in the end, a brighter day will come.”

Victor Dzau and Candice Chen on stage near a podium
Margaret Moss speaking at a podium

Margaret Moss

“So, I always tell nurses, could be any other health professions, always ask: “how do you identify?” Maybe they’ll say ‘I don’t want to identify’ and maybe you’ll learn more than you ever thought you’d learn. But people need to start asking how people identify. If people want to say ‘I’m giving culturally responsive and safe care,’ well if you don’t even know who’s in front of you, how can you say that?”

Brigit Carter, Theresa Horvath, Erin Fraher, and Eleanor Fleming sit on a stage with microphones

Erin Fraher

“The big issue is not that our supply is not increasing, it’s that the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is increasing.”

Davarian Baldwin

“[Our information about Christopher Newport University] got in front of VA delegate Delores McQuinn. She was so moved by the research and advocacy that we did, that she put together a statewide commission to study the history of the uprooting of the Black communities by public institutions in the state of Virginia. Moving towards some type of policy project towards reparations for those aggrieved communities and families…This is what happens when you put your research to work. Research, humanities, scholarship matters when it’s directed towards a true social mission.”

Davarian Baldwin speaking at a podium
Robert rock stands at a podium with two students standing behind

Robert Rock

The following quotes were during the Rapporteur session at the end of the conference.  

“Health care as currently constructed is often violent to the people cared for and to the people providing the care.  That fatigue is what oppressors want. It’s what institutions want. Specifically for activists, advocates, and agitators, to be too tired to, too preoccupied, or generally in too precarious of a position to organize. But we can’t let that happen. We have come too far in this struggle to reshape the education system that wasn’t created with people like me in mind; with people like us in mind. We are part of a generational legacy of lifelong learners imagining and fighting to realize a system accountable to the history and lived reality of the oppressed groups that this country was built on.”

“The history is being omitted to hide that our true power does not lie in our professional titles, but collectively among ourselves and the communities that love us.”

“I hope that as we go forward today, we leave this room, the relationships that we’ve created, the ideas that have been reaffirmed in our hearts, leave this room and pour into your institutions and the communities that they are accountable to caring for.”
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