S6 E11: Diane White Believes Healthcare Needs Reform—And That Antiochians Will Help Lead It

Jasper Nighthawk: [00:00:00] This is the Seed Field Podcast. The show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories and come together to win victories for humanity. I’m your host Jasper Nighthawk. And today we’re joined by Diane White. For a conversation about Antioch’s new Graduate School of Nursing and Health Professions, which Diane has been tapped to lead as its founding dean.

So we’re going to be talking about her vision for the school, what she sees as needing reform in health care in the US and around the world, and the ways that nurses and other health professionals can be part of fixing a system that today leaves so many behind. Before I bring Diane on, I want to take a moment to say, from myself, that I am so excited that Antioch is founding this new school.

And I think that nursing and health [00:01:00] professions in particular is such an important place for us to be spending our time and resources to try and really move the needle. I really believe that this school will meet a present need.

In my experience, there are so many people across the country who are anxious to join the healthcare field, both because they feel called to serve and heal their fellow humans, but also because these are often that rare thing, a steady job that pays well and can support a family. As much as Antioch can help lower the barriers for folks to enter these professions and can help make a better world, Health professionals who are better equipped to serve their communities.

It’s a massive win for students and for our larger society. So with my enthusiasm out of the way, we can talk about this more. Let me introduce Diane. Diane White is the founding dean of Antioch’s Graduate School of Nursing and Health Professions. Before joining us, Diane had a distinguished career.

She was a nurse. Then she worked, for a long time [00:02:00] as an educator in nursing programs. And more lately she’s been working in administration again for nursing programs and health science programs. And these categories are fluid. Her latest job before coming to Antioch was as professor and dean of the school of health sciences at Georgia Gwinnett college.

So now that people know a little bit about who you are, Diane, welcome to the seed field podcast.

Diane White [02:23]: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here today.

Jasper [02:27]: But before we get to that, we always like to start the show by asking guests to disclose their positionality, especially when their background and where they’re coming from might be relevant to the topic at hand.

Obviously, healthcare touches on basically every vector of power and discrimination in our society. So I can go first. I think it’s useful for listeners to know that I am a white cisgendered man. I’m not living with a physical disability. Currently, though, I do experience anxiety and depression. I’m queer.[00:03:00] I have a college degree and a master’s degree. I have steady housing and income. And I’m also the parent of a kid who is almost two years old. And this has led me to spend a lot of time in the American healthcare system uh, the last couple of years. Okay, Diane, as much as you’re comfortable, can you share your position?

Diane [03:19]: Absolutely. Thank you. I am a white, cisgendered woman. I do not live with a physical disability, and I am straight. I have a college degree, a terminal degree as a PhD in nursing. I have steady housing and income, and I also am the proud mother of two children, a single mother with a 22 year old son and an 18 year old daughter.

Jasper [03:45]: Thank you for sharing that. And as a parent of a new child, that seems like an exciting age also. So we’re going to talk a lot about the Graduate School of Nursing and Health Professions and how you’re seeing solving problems. But I want to start by focusing on the [00:04:00] problems themselves and what you see as needing reform in the American healthcare system. And, I thought a good place we could start this was by talking about the COVID 19 pandemic, the ways that it laid bare some of the inequalities and challenges in our healthcare system. And, I guess I would just throw this to you: what did the pandemic reveal about our healthcare system?

Diane [04:23]: I think it revealed many things. One of which is that we were not prepared on many levels. I don’t think we were prepared as a healthcare system to know what to do when that pandemic happened, let alone know how to serve all humanity in that. I think, we’ve known that racism and inequities have existed throughout time amongst healthcare and other sectors, but COVID really unpeeled the layer and showed us distinctly, not only just in [00:05:00] diagnosing, but in treatment, accessibility, the issues around education, poverty, economics, everything just came full flooded, right? And so it showed us a lot. But I don’t know that we’ve learned what we needed to learn. I think we may be prepared for the next pandemic in logistical ways.

Jasper [05:21]: Like there’s more, more masks on hand or something like that?

Diane [05:23]: Yeah, like there’s a command center and this is what you do and you triage and all that. Okay, maybe we’ve learned some of that and those plans are better in place and they’re being enacted now and practiced in different health settings and by the public health system. But I don’t see that we did anything about the health disparities in the marginalized groups. We talk about it, but I don’t see a lot being done about it. Whether it’s through education, through access, through political environment, whatever. So I think COVID showed us a lot. I’m just don’t know that it taught us a [00:06:00] lot.

Jasper [06:01]:  When I was preparing for this episode, I had recently heard this data point that I think spoke to some of these disparities, both, for how people interact with our public health infrastructure and also with how, nurses themselves are, disparately impacted. And I’d heard this statistic that said that 25 percent of registered nurses who died during the pandemic were Fillipinx or Filipino. And while that was only 4 percent of registered nurses in the United States at large. And I was just thinking, That was like such a striking example of how the harms of something like a global pandemic can fall disproportionately on people who are living with a lot less privilege in our society.

Diane[06:49]: I agree. I mean, I think we heard a lot in the media about how we didn’t have enough PPD and equipment and to protect nurses and they were having to reuse the same HN95 [00:07:00] for a week. And you had to zip lock it before you went home. I mean, things that in this country, we shouldn’t even be thinking about, right? I mean, We should have this. We didn’t have it. So I think, right there, we had a high risk for our health care providers to be exposed to something that was very deadly and what we didn’t know. But you think about the statistic you just said in the Asian population. So they had the same PPD equipment that we had yet why did they have a higher rate? Is it because of the culture, the access, communal living arrangements that many people have? I’ve been able to live with my two Children in a house that had plenty of space. But that’s not everybody, right? Even to think about when we had to quarantine and all the rigorous rules we had about putting health care workers that have been exposed in other parts of the house, the basement, keep them away. They weren’t able to be in the same living area. The reality is [00:08:00] everybody couldn’t do that. We had no understanding when we tell people, whether it was the CDC, the government, whoever all of us saying, hey, to our students, even that we’re having to go home after being exposed in dormitories or whatever. We talked as if they could do these things.

Jasper Nighthawk [08:17]: Yeah. So this is one of the ways that our healthcare system can make assumptions like everybody is a middle class white person and, they can issue these guidances and expect, if you don’t follow them, that’s your own fault. And if you think about unhoused people, there are so many unhoused children in our country,

Diane [08:37]: Absolutely.

Jasper [08:37]: Yeah, you think about people who are living, maybe four or five couples sharing a one bedroom apartment because rents are so incredibly high. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me as one of these health disparities where at the surface, it’s like, well, this is housing, this isn’t healthcare, but those two things trying to tease them apart is impossible.

Diane [08:58]: The kind of things we were [00:09:00] telling people was what we knew by science that we knew of at the moment to tell them. But that application of those things and the applicability of that for all people is not true. I mean, it showed us social determinants of health in real life.

Jasper [09:16]: And they were so visible because it, this was an emerging phenomenon, it was something that hadn’t existed, you know, six months earlier. And then it was like, here is a spotlight being shined on, on these social determinants of health as you put it.

Diane [09:30]: Absolutely. And, you know, the people making the decisions or the people at those tables that were the, scientists or the, physicians, whomever else, um, government officials, probably identify more with me, right?

Jasper [09:43]: hmm.

Diane [09:44]: The people that were participating in the decision makings weren’t people that had lived that experience. So again, that whole power structure of, coming up with something scientific to do and say, but yet not making it applicable to who has to do it [00:10:00] only caused the proliferation of COVID to continue, right?

Jasper[10:03]: And that’s a case where we can see explicitly the way that when you don’t take care of all of us, it harms all of us.

Diane [10:12]: All of us.

Jasper [10:14]: I want to get to kind of how we start taking apart the big ball of yarn, like, making sure that there are other people at the table and how that kind of goes into your thinking around setting up the graduate school of nursing and health professions. But I, I want to just take one second and just say, as much as COVID shined the spotlight, these health disparities exist across almost all ailments. I was thinking specifically of the way that diabetes affects people of color in this country at rates several times greater than it affects white people. And, we’re talking not just, having to take blood sugar readings or artificial insulin, but having amputations, losing limbs on your body.

Diane [10:55]: The complication rates are exceedingly greater [00:11:00] amongst, marginalized groups, but I would even take it back one further. If we really want to get to some of the crux of some of the things is just look at the racism in research that occurs.

Jasper [11:13]:  Hmm. Please talk about that. Yeah.

Diane [11:15]: We’re making medical decisions based on evidence based practice, right? That’s what we are to be doing is providing evidence based practice.

Jasper [11:24]: Yeah. And like the gold standard is like—

Diane [11:24]: Yeah. And yet we don’t report certain things or we choose to read or report certain things or exclude groups or exclude certain criteria. When you talk about changing the healthcare system, like there is so many facets to what we’re talking about today about the inequity that exists and it’s not just in the care, the diagnosis, it starts even before of what we know in medicine to treat people. It starts even there that we have problems.

Jasper [11:54]: Yeah, and I love the way I feel like we started zoomed in on COVID and you can [00:12:00] see one person falling ill, and dying, and then you zoom out and start seeing the way that systematic forces have led to that death. And then you keep zooming out and saying, it’s these, government ministers sitting at the table who don’t look like the people whose policies are impacting. It’s the way that the studies are formulated that they are almost exclusively including white people or, you know, I think about in the field of dermatology and oncology, the way that skin cancers among black people are totally criminally understudied and massive killers.

Diane [12:32]: Right.

Jasper [12:33]: Yeah I think that’s a good point to jump over. And I want to ask, how did you come to this work? Like, how did you come to see the importance of health inequities and the social determinants of health? Was that something that you knew when you first stepped onto a hospital ward?

Diane [12:51]: No. I mean, I worked at a place. You know, my first job was in an indigent care institution that had many patients that were uninsured. But [00:13:00] my reasoning for going there was because I knew it was a teaching hospital. It had some of the most sick clients you would ever see and take care of. So if I went there, I learned from there, then I could go anywhere. That was my thinking. Very young, didn’t see it as what I now think, gosh, if I had this kind of lens when I worked there, could I have made a larger impact than just saving lives, or actually, doing something sooner when I was younger? I mean, it’s never too late to start, but that’s not where that started for me. I know that, there was some problems I saw in how people were treated in a lot of different forums that bothered me, my inner being, like my soul. It just didn’t make sense for people to be unkind to people. What was going on when I was a small girl, and my dad was asked to leave two churches that he pastored because he allowed African Americans to come in and the people of the church said no. Even as a young girl, [00:14:00] seeing that happen and hearing that language and the dialogue amongst what I thought were older people and intelligent, obviously not.

Jasper [14:07]: Yeah,

Diane [14:08]: And I sat there and I thought, this is odd. First of all, it’s odd, especially, I think, in a religious faith based place, when I’m thinking, I thought that we were all created equal, I thought we all talk about loving everybody, and one creator, and we’re all equal, but we’re not treating each other that way. So I think, as a young girl, I was bothered by things, but then when I went into nursing, those first 10 or years or so at Grady, I was so focused on my own education trajectory, things like that. I would walk in every day, the homeless would be there, the mental health, like it didn’t bother me either way. So I was neutral, which isn’t good either. Neutral is just saying, it’s okay. If you’re not pushing the status quo, then you’re just as bad as the people who just think that’s okay, right?

Jasper [14:58]: That’s such a good point.

Diane [14:59]: Yeah, so I think when it happened [00:15:00] for me was, as I got into education, and then especially in the last 2 institutions I worked at, there was, it was access institutions. So many of those are first gen students and I really started listening to the stories. I worked in the most diverse County and I live in the most diverse County in the South,

Jasper [15:22]: Gwinnett. And you’re in Georgia?

Diane [15:23]: Yes. I’m living and was being able to be an educator in a place that gave me rich stories. So what I learned was active listening was really key. Cause once you start listening to people that don’t look like me and understanding their world and their lens and the challenges that they have, that I was privileged and never had, it made me start thinking about the bigger picture. So I knew how to care for individuals as a nurse, and I was trained that way because I want to serve and care for. What was missing in my training and what I’ve [00:16:00] learned is we have to train others to care about. There’s a bigger thing going on other than that one patient that I’m serving that day. So when I let that patient be discharged or that patient goes home or they go out to their communities, what are the social structures in place that are still inhibiting them from being optimally well? And as an ICU nurse in acute care, I never thought like that. But education and working at institutions where they were access institutions and having diversity and listening to those stories, I would say, probably the last eight to 10 years I’ve gotten on this thing of, I’ve got to learn more. I got to understand what’s going on. So I wasn’t that way in the 25 years of ICU nursing. I didn’t have that lens that I have now. But I think it, it’s evolved and it’s still evolving. I still have a lot to learn.

Jasper[16:53]: Before we were recording, you had told me a story about a moment when you realized something [00:17:00] about your own unconscious bias as a teacher. I wonder if you’d be willing to share that here.

Diane [17:04]: Sure. Thankfully those young ladies were bold, right? And came up to me. So early on in my academic career, I was still doing full time nursing and I was asked to guest lecture at a large university here in Atlanta. And I did, there was about 300 students in the class. And so at the end of the class, these three young ladies came down and it was either two Asians and one African American or two African American, one Asian, but they didn’t look like me. And they said to me, they said, ‘oh, we just want to let you know, we really enjoyed your lecture and all the stories. It made sense to what you were teaching and now we can connect it.’ So I was just sitting there thinking I’m pretty good right at or whatever, but then they said. ‘But can we tell you something?’ And the but or the however, then obviously I was like, there’s something. And I said, absolutely. What? And they said, have you ever noticed when you [00:18:00] ask for questions and people’s hands go up, have you ever noticed that you always pick people that look like you first? Wow. I said, no, I’ve never even thought about it. It was unconscious, but it was bias. I always pick people that look like me first, no matter how long the hands have been up. Now, I didn’t intend to be that way. but I was unconsciously doing that. Thankfully, they had the whatever, the power, the strength to say, you know, let’s go talk to her, she seems approachable. Let’s see what she says. She’s a guest lecturer. I wasn’t grading them. So that probably helps too, right? If I don’t have your grade, but that right there made me really stop and think and go, wow. And that was probably 1994, it wasn’t terribly long, long ago, but it really made me start being more conscious of my behaviors, especially when I’m in the learning [00:19:00] environment.

Jasper [19:01]: Yeah. That is such a, that is such a gift and like to have somebody tell you that, especially early in your career. When you’re figuring out how you’re going to move through a space like a classroom. And I also, I think it reflects well on you that you tell that story. I always want to be thoughtful in my own work that I’m not calling on my colleagues who are Black or who are in, in some other way have a marginalized identity that I’m not asking them like, hey, can you just in addition to all your job duties or being a student, can you also be like the police for microaggressions and train us all how to be better people? But of course that also can be a gift and wonderful. And so I think I appreciate your emphasis on you in your role and all of us in our roles, creating space where other people feel safe to let us know when we’ve hurt their feelings or stepped on them in some way.

Diane [19:56]: Right and that’s I think the part where I’m at I’m really learning, I mean it’s [00:20:00] an evolution for all of us. I don’t think it’s a destiny of where we get right with addressing dei and b and all that. I think it’s a constant learning and a reiteration of where we’re at and how we can be. So, I’m not the expert on it. I’ve learned and I want to learn more and sometimes when you learn, Jasper, it’s when you actually make mistakes or you just said, gosh, I really screwed that up, but you what? I’m going to learn from it and change my behavior and move on. So I think it’s just that mindset.

Jasper [20:31]: Yeah. And so with the topic of learning I want to leave some space here to talk about setting up the graduate school of nursing and health professions, which is this massive undertaking. The work is not done. I think the work is just commencing for you. And it’s an exciting time with a lot of potential. So I’m excited to get to talk to you right now. And yeah for starters, I just wanted to lay out for our listeners a little bit of the history of where this [00:21:00] program is coming from, because I know it’s not tabula rasa. So I will just give like my little pocket history.

Antioch University is now part of a nationwide system of institutions of higher education centered around a common mission. And this is called the Coalition for The Common Good. And right now it’s one of two partner institutions. The other one is Otterbein University in Ohio and Otterbein University has previously had graduate programs in nursing and other health professions. And as part of the Coalition for The Common Good, these programs are being transferred to Antioch university, which is serving as the graduate university for the whole coalition. And as part of that transfer, and part of the reason why this is being done, is that it enables them to reach audiences far beyond Central Ohio. Antioch has campuses on both coasts and online [00:22:00] programs that reach people in all 50 states. And What did I get wrong there? and why is that an exciting moment to come in?

Diane [22:08]: You didn’t get it wrong. Very good. It is very new. But we are purposely and very intentionally looking at what institutions would be next to join the Coalition for Antioch and Otterbein, but this Antioch-Otterbein relationship is it’s just a perfect union in a lot of ways. When you look at their mission and the 1800s, what they were about and why they were built. And then you look at Antioch the same way. When they all started, it started back as a whole idea of the common good. It really did. And to look at inequities and things like that. And so to bring it back to why those institutions were really founded and use the coalition as that platform, is just phenomenal. But most importantly, I think the Coalition is our catalyst to get the work [00:23:00] done that has to be done in the areas we’re talking about. And today we may be talking about nursing and health professions, but every sector needs work if we’re really going to bring about the idea of humanity and all of us being equal. Because the social construction and the constraints we have there that affect healthcare and other things exist in business, exist in education for sure, right? So I think it’s just a perfect platform for us having action now. And the more that we can have other educational institutions for that common good and to working on it, I see it nationwide. I think, it’’s phenomenal. No other place has done this in an education coalition. So for me to be even a part of this, I’m like, how in the world did I get this lucky? How in the world, right? I said to myself, self, what are you going to do for your last, little gig here before I retire? And I thought, what can I do? I love the idea of [00:24:00] education, health professions, but I think before I get out full time of education, I want to make a different impact. And where I was at is a small liberal arts, we were talking about obviously we had a DEI infused in our curriculum because regulation standards through the accreditation say you have to now, but we infused it, and as a campus, we talked about it, but I didn’t see the real action evaluation part of it that we could do.

Maybe one day it’ll all get there. And we were doing it some, but I thought, this is just, there’s gotta be something bigger where I can be a part of equipping those students and helping them learn. The care about part that I mentioned not just the care for. So, when obviously when this came across and I read it, I was like wow I mean how fortunate would I be could I ever to get this job? But it was so exciting the way they wrote the thing and they said oh they wanted a passionate Dean. I knew I’d found it at undergraduate [00:25:00] school and develop programs and health sciences and build a health science building with the architects. I’d done those things, but I hadn’t done it at the graduate level. But to think that we could do it at a level where not only are we preparing competent and extraordinary practitioners and health professionals, because we got to do that. And that’s what Otterbein’s been doing. Oh, my gosh, they have done so, so well. But now, bringing them from the caring for, to the care about issues and looking at everything when they see one patient, they look at that patient through a lens of social justice from now on. They never look at a patient the same. That’s what we need because it’s those people who are going to drive the questions and the dialogue and push the status quo and say this isn’t okay.

Jasper [25:49]: Yeah, so talk to me more about this in particular. How do you approach this work of setting up a school that is infused with social justice and has that as one of the core tenants [00:26:00] alongside, say, mastery of anatomy or all of these other subjects that need to be taught as far as curricular standards.

Diane [26:07]: You have to be very intentional. It’s not just to check off and get things right for accreditation standards or for whatever the department of education says we have to do. So of course you look at your mission and your vision and you look at that mission and make sure everything you’re doing is about that. So one of the key things that we’re doing is we have a great curriculum that Otterbein has had. The pass rates for standardized tests, the graduation rates are decent, workforce placements good. So honestly, it’s not the change in curriculum or adding more. It’s about intentionally every class from day one, that first class where in that are they starting to learn and build upon social determinants of health, marginalized populations, having crucial conversations. Those kind of things, and building it throughout the curriculum so that when they leave, they’ve been exposed to those populations. So not [00:27:00] just putting people where they can say, okay I did this many pediatric patients, I did this many hours with adult health. Where did you do that? Now, I know some is going to have to be in acute care settings, but much of it can be in the underserved populations. We to identify those populations everywhere we are, and make sure we’re connecting our students to be with those people. That’s just one piece.

Jasper [27:26]: Yeah, I mean, one thing that you brought up earlier which, you and I maybe have less ability to affect is the way that at a nationwide level, policymakers often look, like you said, the way that you and I do like white have advanced degrees. Yeah, but, but you do have a great deal of influence over this program that you’re helping found the school. How do you approach a diversity of, I don’t know, of people?

Diane [27:51]: You do. No, you’re right. We, I cannot have students and faculty and administrators that just look like me. That’s not going to get us [00:28:00] anywhere. That is not going to do it. As I’ve talked about with our administration and EM office and other things, I want intentionality. Now, I can look at workforce data and say here’s a great place in this state, they have so many nurses and not mid level provider nurses and so on and so forth. I want to drill further. What do those students look like and where do they serve now? Are they in rural settings? Are they closer urban? Not to say there’s not health disparities in the urban. There are. But you have to have that lens to see it. That’s the issue, which is what we’re going to make sure too. But I think, recruiting those students and having support systems in place for those students to be successful, because those are the very students that are going to teach me and teach other people that look like me about their world. And I need to learn. So if I bring in other people like me, I don’t learn anything. But if I bring them in and listen to them, then I get to hear from them. My faculty get to, I bring in faculty and administrators that don’t look like me, that [00:29:00] don’t think like me, don’t have that lens that I don’t have the lens they have. And when you do that from the beginning, and then you allow those students to go back in their communities and make a difference, or be equipped with the tools to be asked to the table, and be asked, maybe I won’t ask, I’ll just go to the table. That’s what we’re going to do. We can be politically correct and we can do what we need to do, but the reality is these students need to graduate with the tools to get to the table, stay at the table, but most importantly, know how to go to the table if they’re not asked. Because they’re not being asked.

Jasper [29:33]: Yeah. So you’re seeing nurses, not just as, being good at doing a 12 hour shift, keeping their patients alive. You’re also seeing them as agents of change and hopefully progress inside their hospitals working with administration at their hospitals.

Diane [29:49]: Absolutely. I often say I can’t wait to see our Antioch graduates, asked by the next president or the cabinet or CDC to be on whatever task force. [00:30:00] I think some will, but I’m talking about right now, the healthcare system that exists. How do you start beginning making those changes where you work now?

Just like what you said, Jasper, is it internal within? Where do we start having those conversations to say there is racism in our healthcare and where we work and have those places to do that. It’s education, it’s highly regulated now with what politics or legislative says we can or can’t say, depending on, what kind of institution you’re at. But the reality is, yeah, you get federal funding obviously in hospitals and other places, but you don’t have the gag order on you. You just don’t. But they don’t know how to talk about it. Like they, they could talk about it. Marginalized health professionals feel it, but they should be able to have that conversation. I think the people that aren’t comfortable people that look like me, so we don’t know how to talk. And I’m saying, why don’t we learn and help people learn how to have that in a place that maybe finally we can start having the dialogue to maybe see [00:31:00] some action happen. We’ve got to be able to talk about what exists and not believe it doesn’t exist. It exists. If we’re really going to change the next pandemic, because there will be another one. But are we really going to do something different,

Jasper[31:14]: Yeah, no, that’s a good question. And I appreciate you asking and giving your answer to the question of. How do we start? Because I think at the outset of this conversation, we talked about these disparities and the way that our system, which has been built up over centuries, in many ways, just cements these and passes them on and the health disparities, they can’t all be fixed at the hospital level. Some of them have to be fixed at the housing level, at the economic justice level. It’s such an enormous ball of twine. And so your question of like, how do you start? What I hear you saying is with one nurse, with one conversation,

Diane [31:56]: One allied health professional, look at the students doing [00:32:00] our health administration track. Isn’t that perfect for them to come out? And be administrators at hospital that have this lens. Therefore, you allow nurses and respiratory therapy and all the other health professions, athletic trainers, anesthesiologists. Allow them to have that voice if we have our health administration students getting the idea that, hey, this has to happen. We have to have strategic plans around this. And how do we allow this to happen within our organizations? So I think, nursing is one thing, but look at allied health. Look at what can happen there with those health administration people that could really, make some change where they work.

Jasper [32:38]: That’s such a good point. Yeah. And I, I think because you have this nursing background we’ve been talking a lot about nursing, but–

Diane [32:45]: Right. It’s always easy for me to say nursing. I know because that’s what I’m familiar with. But the reality is healthcare is so much more than nursing, even though we’re one of the largest professions in it. It takes a village

Jasper [32:56]: Yeah. And I mean, nothing wrong with the school of nursing, but [00:33:00] this is a school of nursing and health professions. So there, there are other ways and other entry points where Antioch grads are going to be pushing the healthcare system in their own ways. So we’re almost out of time. I have one last question for you. So I wanted to ask if we’re to talk again in five years, we say, come back on the Seedfield podcast, what would success look like for you? And, what would success look like for the, the graduate school of nursing and health professions?

Diane [33:28]: Well, I think one of the first success marks is okay, we have all of those launched that we said we were going to do, by 26-27, and that each of those programs is still maintaining excellent outcomes by their accreditation standards and that they’re all accredited, fully accredited. I would like to know that we have a master’s in public health. I think that’s a huge area we’ve got to address because of the things we’ve talked about today. And getting those students ready for when that pandemic comes and those people that sometimes are even closer [00:34:00] to the legislative body and the government type of entities because they obviously are paid that way in the states. So I would think that would be success. But success on measuring, the about peace. I would say, that we would actually see on employer surveys and post alumni surveys where they’re actually active having those conversations or committees have been formed within their institutions, and they’re leading those or chairing those, you know, to talk about that. They’re actively involved in that. I would, say too I think a part of success is making sure the students that come to Antioch, even though it’s an online programming in most cases with mine, not all of them, but most. Do the students feel like they belong when you ask that? Were they engaged? Was it a different experience within the learning environment that allowed them to role model behaviors out there? What was being role modeled by their faculty [00:35:00] and their peers and in those conversations and interactions. For me, success will be launch of those programs, but that Antioch is addressing and talking about the hard topics. And pushing that status quo, but our students feel like they belong, and they feel empowered when they leave. To make that difference. So, I think that would be success in five years.

Jasper [35:22]: It sounds like you have your work cut out for you, but it’s always good to have a clear vision and you’re off to a great start. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Diane. It’s been a pleasure.

Diane [35:31]: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jasper [35:36]: The Graduate School of Nursing and Health Professions that we’ve been talking about has already launched with several degree programs. You can find those on Antioch’s website, and we’ll link to them in our show notes. We post these show notes on our website, theseedfield.org, where you’ll also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes, and more. The Seedfield Podcast is produced by [00:36:00] Antioch University. Our editor is Johanna Case. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Jen Mont is our web content coordinator. Stephanie Paredes, Lauren Arianzale, Grace Curfman, Danny Lapointe, Lisa Wisner. Tawana Davis, Diana Dynerman, and Natalie Obando are our work study assistants. Additional production help came from Karen Hamilton, Adrian Applegate, Jamila Gaskins, Amelia Bryan, Ashley Beavers, and Melinda Garland. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity.

From Antioch University, this has been the Seed Field Podcast.