Tag: Health care provider

Gratitude for Mentors

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Dr. Lorna Mill Barrell (1931-2014), a nursing mentor of mine, after lunch in the Jefferson Hotel, Richmond, Virginia in 1996.

We now have the ‘science of gratitude’ to back what we’ve already known: gratitude is good for us, both individually and collectively. That we have a national holiday named for gratitude is something that–despite the complicated colonization and empire-building historical roots–I am thankful for.

Over the past four months, I have had the privilege of interviewing a variety of people in the Seattle area who work (or live) at the intersection of health and homelessness. These interviews are part of the oral history component of my ongoing Skid Road project, exploring the historical roots of ‘charity’ health care in King County, Washington (the county within which Seattle is located). One of the first open-ended interview questions I pose to people is, “Who or what has most influenced your work and life?”

People I interview typically pause for a moment after I ask this question, they gaze at some corner of the room as if seeing pleasant ghosts, and then they launch into detailed descriptions of people and events essential to who they are as people and to the work they do. Most people identify one or two key people in their lives who provided a sort of moral compass steering them in the direction of compassion–for their own humanity, as well as for other people. Parents. Teachers. Counselors or therapists. Professional mentors. They can easily tell a specific story of lessons they learned from these key people. And due to my use of snowball sampling–asking them to identify people I should try to interview–I have been able to complete oral history interviews on several generations of mentors.

These interviews have led me to reflect more deeply on the people in my life I am grateful for, people who have influenced who I am and what I do. I am also reminded of the wisdom of Rachel Naomi Remen, MD and her healing work with physicians, nurses, and other caregivers. I often introduce my students to her Heart Journal daily practice. For this, she advocates a 10-15 minute quiet time at the end of the day where you review your day, then write the first things that occur to you when you ask yourself three questions: 1) What surprised me today? 2) What moved me or touched my heart today?, and 3) What inspired me today?  Attention and gratitude.

As a nurse and a teacher, I remember two people who have had the most influence on my work, my life. One is Lorna Mill Barrell, RN, PhD who came into my life when I was seriously considering dropping out of nursing school. It was in November of 1983, my final year of the BSN program at MCV/VCU, and I had just been informed by my community health clinical instructor that she was giving me an ‘F’ on my final clinical rotation project paper. “I don’t see how this has anything to do with nursing,” she wrote across my project paper’s title, “The Health of Richmond’s Homeless Population.” I contested her grade and that’s how I met Lorna, who was the chair of the department my instructor worked in–she was my instructor’s boss.

I remember Lorna’s welcoming and nonjudgmental attitude towards me when I came into her office to meet with her about my grade. I’m sure I came across at first as indignant, haughty, and angry. At the time, I wasn’t just contesting my community health grade, I was also contesting my desire to be a nurse at all. She offered to read and re-grade my paper. Thanks to her intervention, I not only passed community health (she changed my paper grade to an ‘A’), but she helped convince me to finish nursing school and go straight into their master’s program for becoming a nurse practitioner. She was my thesis advisor and the co-author of my first published academic journal article. Within a year of graduating and starting my first job as a nurse practitioner working with homeless and marginalized patients at Cross-Over Clinic, Lorna hired me to teach a community health clinical course.

The other mentor I draw on as inspiration for my current work is another MCV/VCU teacher–from the medical school though–who I only remember as Chaplain Bob. During my first semester of the BSN program, fresh out of a brief stint in a MDiv medical humanities program, I convinced him to let me take his medical school elective course on death and dying. He approached this topic in our small seminar-style class, from a health humanities perspective, having us read and discuss Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, among other works of art and literature. He also encouraged us to write our own poetry and short stories. I took that assignment seriously and wrote a chapbook-length collection of poetry. Chaplain Bob gave me an ‘Aa’ (not entirely sure what that grade really is) for the course, but he also enthusiastically encouraged me to continue my creative, reflective writing. I kept that chapbook. And here, impossibly at age twenty-two (meaning–not that it is great poetry but that is impossibly so long ago) , I wrote:

The Process

Sitting by the hour/ listening to the drone: “The Patient. The Client./And don’t forget the Significant Others./ By all means, keep in mind the Nursing Process.”

“We’re training you to be/ Professionals./ We want you to think/ Independently./ Here, take this test/But don’t think too much/just fill in the dots/the computer will understand.”

We learn to forget,/ to not feel, to not know./ It will hurt too much,/ and it certainly won’t help /us to be professionals.

and…

Waiting 

Sitting on park benches/writing their hands/trying to forget the ill one inside/that hospital there/ the building you just stepped out of/ the one you walk by every day/ that structure that has become/ a part of the skyline/ seen from the window of a dorm room.

It is a lab/a place to practice/the proper way/to give drugs/ to make beds/to become a nurse.

But reflected in the eyes/of the park-bench individuals/ the building becomes/ one room/one bed/one person/one fear/one hope.

____   To all my mentors, named and unnamed (and in Bob’s case, half-named): thank you. Remember to pass it on.

 

 

 

Prostitution: The Oldest Oppression

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Gloria Steinem/Sponsored by Hedgebrook at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, 11-8-15. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2015

Gloria Steinem reminds us that prostitution is not the oldest profession for women, but rather it is the oldest oppression of women. This is not just some catchy, smart play on words by a feminist icon. It contains powerful truths. It contains powerful truths that affect public health and policy. It contains powerful truths that affect all of us, even if we prefer to think that it doesn’t.

I’m writing this post the morning after TV actor Charlie Sheen publicly announced he is HIV positive, and linked his infection to his history of alcohol/drug use combined with his ‘use’ of prostitutes. (See NYT article “Charlie Sheen says he has HIV and has paid millions to keep it secret,” by Emily Steel, 11-17-15.) Considering the fact that ‘use’ of female prostitutes by heterosexual men is correlated with high scores for men on different masculine hostility measures, it strikes me as ironic that Sheen’s last–and now cancelled– TV series was titled Anger Management.

Hopefully, most people know that prostitution is not the twisted Cinderella Hollywood version Julia Roberts portrays in the movie Pretty Woman. But Pretty Woman was written and directed by two fairly macho men, and it was released in the dark ages of 1990. Surely the portrayal of prostitution is much improved today. But no. Even the women’s rights advocate, TV screenwriter and producer Shonda Rhimes, is woefully disappointing on this issue. I recently watched the first season of Scandal (which Rhimes wrote and produced) in which the main character–the professional ‘fixer’ played admirably by Kerry Washington–puts on her white hat/gladiator woman power suit and successfully defends a Washington, DC high-class escort/prostitution madame, allowing her to retire as a rich grandmother in Boca Raton, Florida.

In my thirty-plus years work as a nurse, I have worked with many young women involved in prostitution. I was always clear that it was sexual exploitation for underage girls, but within the progressive subculture of clinics/agencies I worked in, we called adult prostitution ‘sex work,’ and erred on the side of harm reduction: trying to help minimize the harms of prostitution to the patient and the public. In many ways–as I view it now–we were supporting their lifestyle, enabling it, and becoming part of the problem. I remain a strong advocate of harm reduction, especially as it pertains to drug/alcohol addiction, but not applied to prostitution.

I know prostitutes who call it a profession, who say they freely choose their work. I’d like to believe them because it would make my work easier. But so many prostitutes (female, male, transgender) have histories of previous sexual abuse as children. Their bodies are not their own; their bodies have been stolen from them. In such situations free choice is not possible. This, combined with the growing evidence that prostitution–even in countries where it is legal and regulated (including health screens/care)–is one of the most hazardous ‘jobs’ in the world, has led me to the conclusion that prostitution is the oldest form of oppression. Prostitution is part of violence against women.

So, what to do about it? In my hometown of Seattle, we have begun to adopt the ‘Nordic Model’ of intervention: decriminalizing (and diverting to supportive care, including housing, health care, counseling, job training) prostitution for the women/transgender people involved, and stepping up criminalization efforts directed towards the customers–or ‘Johns’–and the pimps/BackPages/brokers in whatever forms they take. And along with stepping up legal ramifications for the buyers and the brokers, Seattle has innovative programs, such as OPS: The Organization for Prostitution Survivors. OPS has a drop-in center for women, survivor support groups, art workshops for survivors, as well as community-based service provider trainings, and the new Stopping Sexual Exploitation: A Program for Men (SSE).

Last week I visited OPS and talked with OPS co-founder (with survivor/activist Noel Gomez) Peter Qualliotine. Peter has taken the lead in designing and facilitating the SSE workshops. He explained that the SSE program was designed and piloted for two years and then began full operation in January 2015. He receives self-referrals as well as court referrals, and he’s hoping to be able to move it more heavily towards referrals. As he put it “8,000 men a day in King County are customers on BackPage,” so waiting for men to be ‘caught’ by either their wives/partners or the police and referred in to a ‘John’s School’ such as SSE, will not be very effective.

The SSE consists of a telephone intake conversation that Peter has with the men. He uses a motivational interviewing technique and asks the men, “How has this been a challenging time for you?” He said that with the rare exception of a man with psychopathic tendencies (my term here), the vast majority of men soliciting sex feel at least some qualms about it and also suffer negative consequences (sexually transmitted infections, guilt, relationship/legal/money issues).

The SSE program is based on the social-ecological model of violence prevention, and includes information and role-play on gender socialization and manhood training. It’s a support group model of three hour sessions over eight weeks, and is purposefully limited to ten men at a time. So far this year they have had sixty men complete the program, with some of the men so positively affected/changed by it that they have volunteered to help with further advocacy. (Stay tuned, because local and national news coverage on SSE is coming soon.)

Meanwhile, I know many people who work within public health realms in Seattle/King County who continue to advocate for legalizing prostitution, as if it is similar to ‘legalizing’ marijuana. And the otherwise admirable social justice/human rights organization, Amnesty International, is also advocating this stance–although they cleverly call it “protecting the human rights of sex workers.”

White People Have Culture

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“Mauri” or life principle, illustration by Nancy Nicholson in Dr. Rangimarie Turuki Pere’s book, te wheke: A celebration of infinite wisdom. Awareness Book Company, 1997.

The word ‘culture’ is misused and abused. We often use the word ‘culture’ as some strangely polite code word for race and ethnicity, for people who are somehow ‘not like us.’ And those of us white people, part of the dominant culture, typically don’t even believe that we have our own culture–like racism, we can’t see it because of our own power and privilege.

Within health care, we have trainings, courses, (and silly multiple-choice tests) on ‘cultural sensitivity’ and ‘cultural competence.’ As if being sensitive to or competent in this thing called ‘culture’ is possible, and if possible, as if it is a good thing. When what we should be doing is teaching to cultural humility and its Kiwi sister, cultural safety: building in self-reflection, life-long learning, and work to see/undo institutional racism.

I’ve written about different aspects of this issue in previous blog posts: “Cultural Competence, Meet Cultural Humility” (8-16-11), “Cultural Humility Redux” (2-2-14)  and “Cultural Safety: A Wee Way to Go” (3-12-14). Until recently, I much preferred the name/concept of ‘cultural humility’ over the name/concept of ‘cultural safety,’ mainly because I didn’t comprehend the need for the word ‘safety.’ My white privilege comfortable blindness there. But the escalating, deeply disturbing litany of racist violence in our country has forced me to see–duh!–the need for ‘safety.’ My recent return to New Zealand, the birthplace of the term ‘cultural safety,’ also opened my eyes to deeper layers of nuanced meaning of this term, of this work.

Jim Diers, MSW and I co-led an international service-learning study abroad program, “Empowering Healthy Communities,” on the North Island of New Zealand this past summer. We had a group of twenty-two engaged university students, across a range of health science and ‘other’ academic disciplines, and from a rich diversity of self-identified race/ethnicities. As many of them pointed out in their final written reflections, they learned as much from living with our group for five weeks as they did from interactions with New Zealanders. We spent a lot of our time working alongside and listening to community members on various Maori marae (villages), as well as Pacific Islander and other marginalized groups in New Zealand. We learned of their strengths, considerable community non-monetary assets, of their hopes for the future–as well as their challenges and historical traumas…the subtext being the need for cultural safety within health care, as well as within all other New Zealand institutions.

As part of a traditional Maori greeting, people introduce themselves–not by our typical name and credentials/work/university, but rather by details of where you are from: the names of the mountain and river of the land of your family/tribe. So for many members of our group, it was “My mountain is Rainer (or Tahoma as local tribes call it) and my river is the Duwamish (currently an industrial dump/Superfund site..).” And “My people are from Italy, England, Nepal, Mexico, the Philippines (and wait–why ‘the’ with Philippines?–important history lesson of oppression there), China, Israel….” Lovely diversity, except that none of us, unfortunately, could claim Native American/Indian ancestry. We were always asked about that by our Maori hosts–another important history lesson that wasn’t lost on our students. Through participating in this seemingly simple ritual of greeting, we all learned about our own cultures.

At the end of our study abroad program, we received an amazingly powerful talk on cultural safety from Denise Wilson, RN, PhD, a Maori New Zealand nurse and Director of the Taupua Waiora Centre for Māori Health Research at AUT School of Public Health and Psychosocial Studies here in Auckland. She talked to the students about her work with cultural safety in New Zealand–about the need for the ‘cloak’ of cultural safety. She told the story of well-intentioned Pakeha (white/European New Zealander) nurses asking their Maori or Pacific Islander patients, “What are your cultural practices,” and being met with polite, blank stares. “Because that’s our language, our terms, not theirs,” she added. She gently admonished our students to get to know themselves, their own cultures and biases, and to practice humility when working with people they perceive as ‘different’ from themselves–to listen, and “really listening takes time.”

Her closing quote, from Dr. Rangimarie Turuki Pere, whose book I reference in the photo caption in this post, was this:

“Your steps on my whariki (mat)/Your respect for my home/opens my doors and windows.”

Words to live and work by.

BE Uncomfortable

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Sliding doors/front entrance to the Nelson Public Library, South Island, New Zealand. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2014

“BE uncomfortable. That’s how you learn!” was one of the final exhortations to our students by Pepe Sapolu Reweti at the conclusion of our”Empowering Healthy Communities” study abroad in New Zealand program this past summer. She was describing the fact that there are many Pakehas (‘white’/European descent New Zealanders) who do not personally know any Maori people, much less ever been on a Maori marae (‘meeting place’ similar to our U.S. Indian ‘reservation’ except that it is the ancestral home of the Maori iwi, or tribes), much much less ever have been in a Maori home. She pointed out that our students had all been on a marae (several, in fact) and had been inside a Maori community meeting house, and had shared ‘kai’ (a meal–several, in fact). That’s an honor and a privilege and something for us to learn from, to take back home–to apply in our own country, in our own daily lives. If the students learned nothing else from this study abroad experience, I hope they learned this.

I was reminded of Pepe’s words this past week as I listened to Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about his latest book Between the World and Me, written in the form of a letter to his son about being a black man in the deeply scarred and racist modern day America. His talk was in the sold-out 2,900 seat McCaw Hall at the Seattle Center, as part of the Seattle Arts and Lectures literary series. The interviewer asked Coates about his article “The Case for Reparations” in the June 2014 edition of The Atlantic, and why he thought it had ‘gone viral’ and been so popular among white people. He replied that he thinks people like the fact he doesn’t sugar-coat things, that “It’s a sign of respect the way I talk directly about things.” And he added, “Reality is uncomfortable. Period.”

Looking around the packed auditorium in one of the whitest cities in America, I wondered how many of us white audience members were now wallowing in white guilt: white guilt which is itself a white self-indulgent privilege. How many of us white Seattleite audience members are willing to push past white guilt to do anything constructive to confront racism in our country, in our city, in our neighborhood, in our own homes? And what are we as health care educators doing to ‘teach meaningfully to’ the effects of personally-mediated and institutionalized racism?

“…as Americans we are so heavily invested in shame, avoidance, and denial that most of us have never experienced authentic, face-to-face dialogue about race at all.” (“To Whom It May Concern” by Jess Row in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Maxine King Cap, Fence Books 2015, p. 63.) In this same essay, Row states she once saw a book on classroom management for college teachers with the title When Race Breaks Out. “As if it’s like strep throat, as if it has to be medicated, managed, healed.” (p62.)

We need to allow ourselves–and our students–to be uncomfortable, to confront uncomfortable truths in order to learn any lessons that are worth learning.

Carrying Stories: Beyond Self Care

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Girl with Balloon, street art by Banksy. This one found at intersection of K-Road and Queen Street in Auckland, New Zealand. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2015.

What to do with difficult stories? Stories of refugees, victims of mass shootings, of hate crimes, of rape, of torture victims, of people dying alone and unnoticed ?  It all gets overwhelming and depressing to hear or read these sorts of difficult stories, to carry them in our hearts, to bear witness to so much suffering in the world.

Of course, for many fortunate (perhaps unfortunate?) people, there is the option of tuning out these stories, turning off the news, unplugging from any non-vacuous form of social media. Taking a break from difficult stories.

But what about all the other people who cannot or choose not to disconnect? What about people whose work involves listening to these stories on a daily basis? Frontline health care providers who work with people experiencing trauma (physical, emotional, sexual). First responders. Counselors, mental health therapists, lawyers. Human rights activists. Researchers working on social justice issues. What can they do to, if not prevent, at least deal effectively with, vicarious or secondary trauma? And for those of us who teach/train/mentor students in these roles, how do we prepare students to be able to carry difficult stories while maintaining well-being?

In a previous blog post, “Burnout and Crazy Cat Ladies,” I explored the issue of ‘too much empathy’ and of pathological altruism, linking to some of the (then/2011) current research. After writing that post and some related essays, I began incorporating a new set of in-class reflective writing prompts for soon-to-be nurses in my community/public health course. I used these in a class session I titled “Public Health Ethics, Boundaries, and Burnout.”

The first writing prompt: ‘What draws you to work in health care? What motivates or compels you to do this work?’ And then later in the class session– after discussing professional boundaries (how fuzzy they can be), individual and systems-level risk factors for burnout, and asking them to reflect on how they know when they are getting too close to a patient, a community, or an issue–I gave them the follow-up writing prompt: ‘Referring back to what you wrote about what draws you to work in health care, what do you think are the biggest potential sources of burnout for you? And what might you be able to do about them?’

Feedback from students about this in-class reflective writing exercise and the accompanying class content on boundaries and burnout, was invariably positive. Many of them said it was the first time in their almost two years of nursing education that anyone had addressed these issues. I understand that patient care, electrolyte balances, wound care and all the rest of basic nursing education takes priority, but it makes me sad that we don’t include this, to me what is fundamental and essential, content.

“…people who really don’t care are rarely vulnerable to burnout. Psychopaths don’t burn out. There are no burned-out tyrants or dictators. Only people who do care can get to this level of numbness,” Rachel Naomi Remen, MD reminds us in her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead Books, 1996). Something to remember when we are feeling overwhelmed by difficult stories.

******

Here are some excellent resources:

 

Creating Change

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Part of the timeline of slavery, racism and related issues. On the wall at entrance to UW Hogness Auditorium for the Health Sciences Service-Learning and Advocacy/Common Book Kick-off event, 10-6-15.

This past week at the University of Washington Health Sciences Common Book kick-off event, I heard a moving speech by Benjamin Danielson, MD. Dr. Danielson is Medical Director at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, a Seattle Children’s community-based clinic in Seattle’s Central District, an area which because of ‘redlining’/racial segregation in Seattle’s history, had been a predominantly black neighborhood. (see the excellent short video “A Really Nice Place to Live” by Shaun Scott). Odessa Brown is co-located in a building with its sister clinic, Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, a clinic I worked at for five or six years. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Danielson while coordinating care for a teen with sickle-cell anemia, and I know first-hand what an exquisitely competent and compassionate physician he is. But this week was the first time I’d witnessed his powerful public speaking abilities.

Our UW Health Sciences Common Book this year is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Time of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). This is the fourth year we have had a UW Health Sciences Common Book, with interprofessional activities based on the book’s theme interspersed throughout the academic year. Previous books have been Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (a classic if not a bit ‘overdone’ by now), Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (great topic but his book is in need of heavy editing–he rambles), and last year’s book was Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (great topic but read like a doctoral dissertation–which it was). The New Jim Crow is written in an accessible, non-academic and powerful style, and is, of course, on a painfully current topic in the U.S. and one pertinent to health care inequities: racism.

Dr. Danielson started his talk by acknowledging the history of the Central District where he works, and the ‘strong black women,’ of the neighborhood’s past, Odessa Brown and Carolyn Downs, for whom the two community clinics are named after. Both women advocated for quality and accessible health care for their communities. Odessa Brown, who had experienced racial discrimination in accessing health care, was active in starting a children’s clinic in the Central District before she died at age 49 of leukemia. Kudos to the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic for including information on Odessa Brown (the woman) on their front webpage, in ‘Our History,’ right under ‘Our Mission.’

Carolyn Downs was part of the Seattle Black Panther movement, who with the financial help from people like Jimi Hendrix and James Brown (both from the Central District), in 1968 opened what was then the first health clinic in the community. Less of her history is included on the webpage for the clinic, but I know from having worked there and taking care of the daughter and granddaughter of Carolyn Downs, that she died young of breast cancer–and at least partially because of disparities in access to breast cancer screening and treatment.

I provide some of the history of both Odessa Brown and Carolyn Downs because I admire the work they did during their too-short lives, and because–as Dr. Danielson said in his speech–this can become another example of “black people being deleted from history.”

What to do about the continued, pervasive, and destructive problem of racism in our society, including in our institutions ranging from prisons to hospitals and clinics? The main message from Dr. Danielson and Michelle Alexander (through her book) is that it will take both individual and collective action for us (for the U.S.) to create positive change. During his talk, Dr. Danielson spoke of using the companion community organizing guide to The New Jim Crow, titled Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: An Organizing Guide by Daniel Hunter (Veterans of Hope Project, 2015).

In chapter one of this guide, “Roles in Movement-Building,” Hunter references the terminology used by Bill Moyer in his book Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements (New Society Publishers, 2001) This work divides people’s roles into four main groups: 1) Helpers–direct service providers, 2) Advocates-who work to make systems work better for those in need, 3) Organizers–who bring people together to change systems, and 4) Rebels–who speak truth to power and agitate for radical change. The key is to recognize our own strengths and roles–where we are most comfortable working– but also to see the value in the rage of roles played by different people, because an effective social change movement requires people working in all of these roles.

This is similar to the “Bridging the Gap Between Service, Activism, and Politics” group activity from the Bonner training curriculum that I have used for many years when teaching community health. But (of course!) I like the addition of the category ‘Rebels’ to the mix and plan to add that the next time I use this in teaching.

On a very sobering (as if we weren’t already very sober) note, Dr. Danielson ended his talk Tuesday night by adding that for all the good work and innovative community outreach programs of the Odessa Brown Clinic, he often asks himself if they aren’t keeping children healthy enough that they too can end up in our country’s prison system.

Apolitical Intellectuals Teaching Health Policy?

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Collection of health politics and policy teaching materials on my desk at work.

Is it desirable, indeed, is it even possible to teach health policy without also teaching politics? What would it mean to be an apolitical intellectual teaching health policy to future health care professional students?

As a lyrical definition of ‘apolitical intellectual,’ here are the first stanzas of  a poem by the Guatemalan poet and revolutionary Otto Renee Castillo, translated by Francisco X Alarcón. The full text of poem is available here and a powerful ‘spoken word’ version using a slightly different translation is available here .

APOLITICAL INTELLECTUALS
One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the humblest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their country was slowly
dying out,
like a sweet campfire,
small and abandoned.

Basically, as I would interpret it, apolitical intellectuals have a lot of book knowledge and an escapist ‘life of the mind’ sort of attitude, but no practical, down-to-earth working knowledge of power and privilege. I do not aspire to be an apolitical intellectual teaching health policy to future health care professionals.

But I do aspire to be balanced and fair in my approach to teaching health policy. That is one of my prime duties as a teacher. Since I lean towards the Progressive side of politics, especially as politics relates to health and social justice issues, I bring that lens to the teaching of health policy. Many of my health policy current events articles come from the NYT or the (non-partisan but still left-leaning) Kaiser Family Foundation, and many of my videos (as in the photo above) are produced by PBS. I have tried, with limited success, to bring in more Conservative-leaning course readings, videos, and guest speakers. I find that it is difficult to find credible, intelligent, research/data-backed Conservative sources.

If I were teaching health policy at a university in close proximity to Washington, DC, I would probably have better luck finding good Conservative-leaning guest speakers. For instance, the DC-based Heritage Foundation has much different politics from my own, but they are credible, intelligent, and thought-provoking. They currently have an interesting section on their website: “Stop Obamacare Now.”

Since I am about to go on a year-long sabbatical in order to focus on my Skid Road and Soul Stories research and writing projects, I get to put away my health policy teaching materials. Both projects are public scholarship focusing on health policy for homeless and marginalized populations. As such, they are taking me even further away from being an apolitical intellectual. I consider that a good thing, but I do wonder how it will affect my teaching of health policy once I return to the university.

Health Care Bucket Lists

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Bucket list: a list of things you want to accomplish before you die. Derived from the saying, “kick the bucket,” a euphemism for dying–although no one seems to agree on the derivation of “kick the bucket.”

I recently ran across my own bucket list that I wrote when I was twelve years old. I wrote it as part of a seventh grade creative writing assignment. My mother kept all of my childhood writing and presented the packet to me before she died–something for which I am eternally grateful. My short stories about toothbrushes coming to life give me glimpses of my younger self that cannot be accessed through any other medium. Here is my bucket list at age twelve:

  1. Own a pair of sandhill cranes
  2. Have a zoo where all the animals can run free
  3. Have a greenhouse as big as a football field
  4. Learn to ride a unicycle
  5. Go to Australia
  6. Keep an otter
  7. Build my own house over-looking a lake
  8. Write a children’s book

I believe that I wanted to be a writer, a naturalist, or a veterinarian–most definitely not a nurse. My favorite books were (not surprisingly by my bucket list), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water.

What would my bucket list, my hopes for the future of health care be like? Since I am no longer young and idealistic, my health care bucket list comes out sounding way too jaded and cynical. So I turned to question to my younger and hopefully still idealistic senior nursing students. “What are your hopes for health care?” was my specific in-class reflective writing question to them a week or so ago. I asked them to write out a list of their top ten hopes.

Out of the 140 or so students, the vast majority listed some version of “universal access to quality and affordable health care.” Another frequently listed item was “provision of culturally humble health care,” as well as “eliminate racism in healthcare.” Many included ‘an emphasis on community-based primary health care,” and “more funding for public health.” Improved patient safety efforts, especially through good interprofessional health care team communication and safe nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals, was a top-listed item. Closely related to that was “improve working conditions to reduce nurse burnout.” Improved access to better mental health services (including the astutely stated question “why are mental health units so ugly?”) and reducing stigma for mental illness and substance use issues, were also frequently mentioned. “Improving end-of-life and beginning-of-life care” as a way to improve quality of life as well as better use of our health care dollars was another top choice.

Here are some additional student ‘hopes for health care’ that make my heart sing and that give me more than a bucketful of hope for the future of health care:

  • To see the person, not the illness.
  • To create a nursing image that represents our smarts and not just our compassion (and nurses aren’t asked, “why didn’t you become a doctor?”)
  • To have more nursing involvement in policy change. Use my knowledge of the challenges faced by my patients to inform policy advocacy.
  • To ensure that ‘the least among us’ receives the best care possible, and “that I am courageous and prepared enough to advocate for the least among us.”
  • That we realize our patients have backstories that need to be recognized in order to provide the best care for them.
  • Full scope-of-practice for nurses uniformly across the country.
  • I hope I still have hopes for the health care system.

On Strike

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Red Square and Suzzallo Library, University of Washington. Photo credit: Josephine Ensign/2015.

What would happen if you didn’t show up to work, if you walked out of work, if you went on strike? Would anyone notice? Would anyone suffer? Besides earning a (hopefully ‘living wage’) paycheck and (hopefully) decent benefits including heath insurance, how essential is the work we do? And just how expendable are we?

These questions have been on my mind over the past several weeks as a labor dispute rumbles along at the University of Washington in Seattle where I teach. Our faculty members are not unionized, but our teaching assistants are part of the labor union UAW Local 4121. They just voted (90% in favor) to strike if their union representatives can’t negotiate a new work contract with the university by April 30th. Among the union’s terms is one calling on the university to adhere to the City of Seattle’s new minimum wage ordinance that went into effect at the beginning of this month. They are also asking for better health insurance benefits. Their most recent (and first ever) strike was for fifteen days at the end of the academic year in June 2001. Fortunately, I was not teaching at the time, but I understand that the strike created a problem for final exams and grades. (See Columns: University of Washington Alumni Magazine article “Briefing: First Ever TA Strike Hits UW Campus.”)

By now we are all aware of the escalating cost of a college education. An increasing body of research indicates that the largest contributors to this tuition increase are the expansion of the number of university administrators and their inflated (six and seven digit) salaries. The increase in tuition certainly is not going to increased salaries/benefits for most faculty members or to graduate student employees (nor to improved teaching facilities/see paragraph below). An April 5, 2015 NYT op-ed article by Paul F. Campos, “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much,” is refreshingly direct and clear on these issues.

There are approximately 4,500 teaching and research assistant graduate students who work for the University of Washington. My son is one of them, as is my current and best ever teaching assistant. She helps me keep track of and grade all the weekly writing assignments for the close to 150 senior nursing students in a writing-intensive health policy course. She also helps me do battle with the antiquated A-V classroom equipment. Just last week she helped me avoid being electrocuted by a malevolent, malfunctioning microphone that they had jury-rigged to a large boombox on the podium (because the A-V equipment had completely died). I am (still) here to attest to the fact that teaching assistants are indispensable.

And while union membership has been declining in the U.S. over the past several decades, it has been increasing for healthcare workers, and especially for nurses employed by hospitals. That hospitals, including the supposedly not-for-profit hospitals, are big businesses that run like factories, is a well-established fact. Healthcare reform efforts have placed increasing financial pressures on hospital administrators who typically turn these into ‘lean work’ initiatives for the hospital employees below them. ‘Lean work’ probably has some fancy management-speak definition, but it really means that those lower in the food-chain (such as nurses) run their butts off trying to do more work with far less resources.

As Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic (“The Little Union that Could” November 3, 2014), the small but growing union National Nurses United (NNU) has been especially effective at battling the Goliaths of healthcare power and at winning many of these battles. NNU has pioneered the use of one-day strikes to pressure hospital administrators to provide nurses with the resources they need, such as safe nurse-to-patient ratios and adequate Ebola safety equipment. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California and tried to block a state law that would provide safe nurse staffing levels, the nurses of NNU helped to block the Terminator’s block: California remains the only state to mandate safe nurse (RN)-to-patient ratios in hospitals. Yes! Power to the people/nurses!

Here’s some interesting food for thought: When physicians strike, patient mortality goes down; when nurses strike, patient mortality goes up. A physician colleague of mine always tells my students this when he gives a guest lecture in my health policy course. It always grabs students’ attention and it’s not just a random, sensationalized statement. It is backed by a growing number of studies from the U.S. and from other countries (see below). In healthcare, the work of nurses matters. In higher education, the work of graduate student teaching assistants matters.

****** References:

“Evidence of the Effects of Nurses’ Strikes”  by Jonathan Gruber and Samuel A. Kleiner, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2010.

“Doctors’ Strikes and Mortality: A Review” by Solveig Cunningham, Kristina Mitechell, KM Venkat Narayan, Salim Yusuf. Social Science and Medicine. 2008. 67:1784-1788.

Seattle Times article “Grad students employed by UW vote to strike if contract talks fail” by Katherine Long, April 22, 2015.)

“UW regents flee as student activists speak up” by Katherine Long, April 8, 2015, Seattle Times.

Narrative Medicine Collection

product_thumbnail.phpHere are a few of my current favorite narrative medicine/medical humanities things:

  • Heart Murmurs: What Patients Teach Their Doctors (UC Medical Humanities Press, 2014). This new collection of personal narratives by physicians, edited by my colleague Sharon Dobie, MD, a family medicine doctor who teaches and practices relationship centered care. In these essays Dr. Dobie and thirty-five other physicians explore lessons they’ve learned from patients.
  • Those whacky and wonderful Brits have a much better health care system than we do, and they have this wonderful new (creative) collection (is it a book? is it a collage?) on medical humanities. Published by the Wellcome Collection, Where Does It Hurt? The New World of the Medical Humanities is both entertaining and thought-provoking. (While you’re at it, spend some time browsing their website for fun quizzes, interactive educational games, videos, and more). Here’s what they say abut the book:
    “What does it mean to be well? Or ill? And who, apart from you, really knows which is which? Contemporary definitions of medicine and clinical practice occupy just one small corner of a vast field of beliefs, superstitions, cultures and practices across which human beings have always roamed in the search to keep themselves, and others, feeling well.The label ‘medical humanities’ is the best effort we’ve made so far to define the fence that encloses that very large field; recognising that it’s a space in which artists, poets, historians, film-makers, comedians and cartoonists – in fact every one of us – has as much right to explore as any humanities-schooled or clinically trained professional. This book is a walk through that field, a celebration of its rich diversity, a dip into some of the conversations that are going on within it, an attempt to get it in perspective – and an invitation to you to join the conversation yourself.”
  • The always friendly folks in the middle of cornfields in Iowa (University of Iowa) put on a terrific annual narrative medicine conference: The Examined Life Conference. They just announced that a keynote speaker for their upcoming conference (April 16-18, 2015) is poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. His memoir A Place To Stand (Grove Press, 2002) was made into a documentary released last month.