On Friday morning, a nurse at Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services in San Antonio ushered a patient into an exam room. She gave her a gown, told her the doctor would be in shortly, and stepped back out of the room into a changed world.
“I saw the other nurses standing in the hallway,” said Jenny, a nurse who has been with the clinic for five years and asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of being targeted by anti-abortion protesters. “And I just knew.”
In the few minutes she’d been inside the exam room, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for Texas to fully ban the procedure she had just prepped a patient for.
Jenny and four other staff members stood in the hallway, paralyzed. They had a dozen patients sitting in the lobby awaiting abortions, all seemingly unaware of the seismic shift that had just rocked the reproductive health care world.
Before they could even decide how to proceed, the door to the clinic slammed open and a young woman ran in, yelling about Roe v. Wade and saving babies. They didn’t recognize her but believed she was associated with the anti-abortion protesters who often massed outside the clinic.
The woman quickly fled, leaving the clinic staff alone with a dozen sets of eyes staring back at them from the waiting room chairs.
“Obviously, that wasn’t how we had wanted it to come out,” Jenny said.
While other nurses addressed the elephant in the waiting room, Jenny returned to the patient she had just left.
“I just said, ‘You have to get dressed and come back out to the lobby,’” she said. “I told her, ‘The doctor will explain more … but we can’t even give you a consultation today.’”
The legal status of abortion in Texas was murky in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s ruling. The state has a “trigger law” that automatically bans abortion 30 days after the ruling is certified, a process that could take a month or more.
But in an advisory issued Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that abortion providers could be held criminally liable immediately because the state never repealed the abortion prohibitions that were on the books before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
Rather than risking criminal charges, Texas’ clinics stopped providing abortions Friday.
Andrea Gallegos, executive director of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, said she’s hopeful that the clinic’s lawyers may find a way to allow it to resume abortions briefly before the trigger ban goes into effect.
But either way, abortion will soon be banned in the second-largest state in the country. The clinics will close. The staff will relocate or find new jobs. And the people they would have served will melt into the shadows, fleeing over state lines, seeking out illegal abortions or quietly consigning themselves to decades of raising children they never wanted.
Bearing the bad news
The staff at Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services are no strangers to bad news. For years, they’ve had to navigate ever-tightening restrictions that force them to delay care or turn patients away.
But never have they had to deliver so much bad news in such a short period of time. Dr. Alan Braid, who owns the clinic, told the women in the waiting room — and those who had already been admitted to exam rooms — that they were halting all abortions immediately.
Some just got up and left. One woman got upset, angrily demanding that Braid go through with the abortion anyway. She had driven hours to make it to this appointment after her home state of Oklahoma banned all abortions.
“I understand why she’s upset, and she has every right to be upset, but we’re not the enemy here,” Gallegos said. “The only thing we could tell her was this wasn’t because of us, it was because of the Supreme Court.“
One woman was on her fourth visit to the clinic. She’d been too early in the pregnancy for an abortion during the first two appointments, but finally, yesterday, staff were able to detect a pregnancy on the sonogram. But Texas requires clinics to wait 24 hours after a sonogram to perform an abortion, so they sent her home.
She arrived at the clinic Friday morning, not long after the Supreme Court ruled. When staff told her the news, she was bereft — rocking back and forth, wailing, begging for the staff to help her.
“I just told her, you did everything right and we did everything that we could, but unfortunately, our hands are tied today,” clinic director Kristina Hernandez said.
Gallegos said it’s devastating to know just how easily they could have helped that patient.
“Sometimes it’s just a matter of handing somebody a pill, and for the surgical [abortion], it’s less than five minutes,” she said. “It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s safe, it’s done. It’s health care.”
Instead, they had to send her away.
After they cleared the waiting room, the staff turned to the stack of two dozen appointments scheduled for the rest of the day. They distributed the files, took deep breaths, and started dialing.
They explained, again and again: No, you can’t get an abortion here anymore. No, you can’t reschedule. No, you can’t go to another clinic in Texas, or even Oklahoma, or a lot of other states. No, it doesn’t matter if you’re under six weeks. No, not even if you come in right now. No, this isn’t our fault. No, no, no, no.
They offered a list of out-of-state clinics and groups that help fund abortions and travel that they put together when Texas banned abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. They spent most of the day listening to the busy signals and voicemail boxes of clinics in New Mexico, where abortion will remain legal.
They make this effort because there is little else they can do. But they are well aware that many of their patients struggle to find babysitters for the duration of their appointments, let alone traveling out of state to get abortions.
And even if they can find babysitters, and get time off from work, and safely leave the state, Friday’s ruling is only going to make it harder for low-income Texans to access resources to pay for these journeys. Texas abortion funds have stopped paying for out-of-state travel and abortions until they can better assess the legal implications of their work.
Fear for the future
As the pandemonium of the morning subsided, something far worse settled over the clinic: silence. Staff sat around the check-in desk, filing paperwork and tidying up. Someone ordered pizza.
They listened in to televised press conferences, hoping to glean information about their own fates. They talked about where the fight might go from here, and some of the bigger battles they’ve had to wage over the years. They talked about what this meant for their daughters, and the patients they’d treated over the years, and those they would likely never get the chance to see.
A lot of the staff members have been working for the clinic for years. Hernandez was there with Braid when this location opened in 2015.
“This is my baby,” she said. “This is my life, right? This is what I’m good at. This is what I want to keep doing. I can’t do anything else. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”
When Hernandez thinks about all the patients she’s been able to help over the years, it’s overwhelming. She’s had women come up to her in H-E-B, years after she helped with their abortions, and give her hugs before disappearing into the aisles.
On days like this, she thinks a lot about a young woman she spent three hours having a theological discussion with before the woman ultimately decided to have an abortion, and her own sister, who decided not to.
The clinic plans to keep the doors open and the staff employed as long as it can. They’re holding on to hope that they may be able to squeeze in a few more patients before the trigger ban goes into effect.
And they’re still offering follow-up appointments for patients who had abortions recently — perhaps the final patients the clinic will ever get to treat.
A young woman showed up Friday afternoon for her follow-up appointment, with her 3-month-old in tow. She’s a single mom in her early 30s, raising four children already.
When she found out she was pregnant again, she decided she couldn’t responsibly raise another child. She’s already struggling financially, and she was trying to leave her boyfriend, who she said was physically abusive.
“I have to figure out who’s gonna watch my babies on the weekends so I can go to work, and it’s stressful,” she said. “So I’m not gonna bring another baby into this.”
She got the two-drug medication abortion regimen at the clinic earlier this week. It was an easy process, she said, and she was hugely relieved to hear that it had been successful.
But with four kids, if she’d been turned away, she said she wouldn’t have even tried to leave the state or find another way.
“It’s not worth all that effort,” she said. “I would have just kept it.”
Published courtesy of The Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established the nationwide right to choose an abortion.
For decades, the rancorous debate about the ruling has often been dominated by politics. Ethics garners less attention, although it lies at the heart of the legal controversy. As a philosopher and bioethicist, I study moral problems in medicine and health policy, including abortion.
Bioethical approaches to abortion often appeal to four principles: respect for patients’ autonomy; nonmaleficence, or “do no harm”; beneficence, or providing beneficial care; and justice. These principles were first developed during the 1970s to guide research involving human subjects. Today, they are essential guides for many doctors and ethicists in challenging medical cases.
Patient autonomy
The ethical principle of autonomy states that patients are entitled to make decisions about their own medical care when able. The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics recognizes a patient’s right to “receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments” in order to “make well-considered decisions about care.” Respect for autonomy is enshrined in laws governing informed consent, which protects patients’ right to know the medical options available and make an informed voluntary decision.
Some bioethicists regard respect for autonomy as lending firm support to the right to choose abortion, arguing that if a pregnant person wishes to end their pregnancy, the state should not interfere. According to one interpretation of this view, the principle of autonomy means that a person owns their body and should be free to decide what happens in and to it.
Abortion opponents do not necessarily challenge the soundness of respecting people’s autonomy, but may disagree about how to interpret this principle. Some regard a pregnant person as “two patients” – the pregnant person and the fetus.
One way to reconcile these views is to say that as an immature human being becomes “increasingly self-conscious, rational and autonomous it is harmed to an increasing degree,” as philosopher Jeff McMahan writes. In this view, a late-stage fetus has more interest in its future than a fertilized egg, and therefore the later in pregnancy an abortion takes place, the more it may hinder the fetus’s developing interests. In the U.S., where 92.7% of abortions occur at or before 13 weeks’ gestation, a pregnant person’s rights may often outweigh those attributed to the fetus. Later in pregnancy, however, rights attributed to the fetus may assume greater weight. Balancing these competing claims remains contentious.
Nonmaleficence and beneficence
The ethical principle of “do no harm” forbids intentionally harming or injuring a patient. It demands medically competent care that minimizes risks. Nonmaleficence is often paired with a principle of beneficence, a duty to benefit patients. Together, these principles emphasize doing more good than harm.
Although 97% of unsafe abortions occur in developing countries, developed countries that have narrowed abortion access have produced unintended harms. In Poland, for example, doctors fearing prosecution have hesitated to administer cancer treatments during pregnancy or remove a fetus after a pregnant person’s water breaks early in the pregnancy, before the fetus is viable. In the U.S., restrictive abortion laws in some states, like Texas, have complicated care for miscarriages and high-risk pregnancies, putting pregnant people’s lives at risk.
Justice, a final principle of bioethics, requires treating similar cases similarly. If the pregnant person and fetus are moral equals, many argue that it would be unjust to kill the fetus except in self-defense, if the fetus threatens the pregnant person’s life. Others hold that even in self-defense, terminating the fetus’s life is wrong because a fetus is not morally responsible for any threat it poses.
Yet defenders of abortion point out that even if abortion results in the death of an innocent person, that is not its goal. If the ethics of an action is judged by its goals, then abortion might be justified in cases where it realizes an ethical aim, such as saving a woman’s life or protecting a family’s ability to care for their current children. Defenders of abortion also argue that even if the fetus has a right to life, a person does not have a right to everything they need to stay alive. For example, having a right to life does not entail a right to threaten another’s health or life, or ride roughshod over another’s life plans and goals.
Justice also deals with the fair distribution of benefits and burdens. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. has the highest rate of deaths linked to pregnancy and childbirth. Without legal protection for abortion, pregnancy and childbirth for Americans could become even riskier. Studies show that women are more likely to die while pregnant or shortly thereafter in states with the most restrictive abortion policies.
Other marginalized groups, including low-income families, could also be hard hit by abortion restrictions because abortions are expected to get pricier.
Politics aside, abortion raises profound ethical questions that remain unsettled, which courts are left to settle using the blunt instrument of law. In this sense, abortion “begins as a moral argument and ends as a legal argument,” in the words of law and ethics scholar Katherine Watson.
Putting to rest legal controversies surrounding abortion would require reaching moral consensus. Short of that, articulating our own moral views and understanding others’ can bring all sides closer to a principled compromise.
Casey Malish had just pulled into an intersection in the 2nd Ward when a woman with tattoos and pinkish hair unexpectedly hopped into the back seat of his gray Mazda. He handles outreach for the Houston Harm Reduction Alliance, a nonprofit that helps drug users like her stay alive.
The woman, Desiree Hess, had arranged to meet with him, but Malish, as usual, wasn’t sure what to expect on this recent afternoon. Hess told Malish to take her to near the Value Village thrift store before she explained why she was so frantic.
Earlier that day, around 2 a.m., Hess said, a woman — a “teeny-tiny little girl” — overdosed in the warehouse where Hess was hanging out. No one there could find naloxone, a medicine that reverses opioid overdoses, and the woman’s lips turned blue. Hess said she blew into the woman’s mouth, trying to keep her alive, while others covered her with ice. Finally, someone found some naloxone, often referred to by the brand name Narcan, and sprayed the medication into her nose. After the woman regained consciousness, Hess made a decision.
“I knew I had to call Casey,” the 39-year-old recalled, “to get more Narcan.”
Malish drives city streets handing out needles, naloxone, cotton balls, and condoms from the trunk of his sedan. But the Houston Harm Reduction Alliance, which tax records show operates on less than $50,000 annually, can afford to pay Malish only a couple of thousand dollars every now and again. His full-time job is as a research assistant at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Malish — a 31-year-old who said he had a problem with alcohol and opioid pills and then heroin before giving them all up nearly 10 years ago — estimated he can reach only about 20 people like Hess a month. Meanwhile, drug overdoses killed 1,119 people in the city last year, according to the Houston Police Department.
President Joe Biden wants to expand harm reduction programs like the one Malish works for as part of a broader strategy to reduce drug overdose deaths, which surged to more than 107,000 nationwide in 2021. But the $30 million plan faces a complicated reality on the ground. In Houston, as in many parts of the country, harm reduction programs operate on the fringes of legality and with scant budgets. Often, advocates like Malish must navigate a maze of state and local laws, fierce local opposition, and hostile law enforcement.
Regina LaBelle, who served as acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy until November, credits the Biden White House with being the first presidential administration to openly embrace harm reduction to curb drug overdoses. She said that the $30 million, tucked into the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, is still just a first step and that too many groups rely on an unstable patchwork of grants.
“You shouldn’t have to hold bake sales to get people the care that they need,” said LaBelle, who now directs an addiction policy program at Georgetown University.
Plus, the administration faces limits on what it can do when programs face blowback from state legislatures and local leaders. “What you don’t want to do is have the federal government coming in and imposing something on a recalcitrant state,” she said.
Both Republican- and Democratic-led states have legalized aspects of harm reduction, but many remain resistant.
By 2017, all states and Washington, D.C., had loosened access to naloxone, according to Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research. Yet, fentanyl test strips — which help people avoid the powerful synthetic opioid or take more precautions when using it — are illegal in about half of states. According to KFF, seven states don’t have a program that provides people with clean needles, which help prevent the spread of HIV and hepatitis C, as well as bacterial infections and embolisms that develop when overused, weak needles break off in a vein. And New York is the only city operating injection sites, where people can use drugs under supervision, although Rhode Island has legalized them and the Justice Department has signaled it may pave the way for more sites to open.
Texas is among the states that have been slow to embrace the interventions — and hasn’t expanded eligibility for Medicaid, so Texans with low incomes have limited access to recovery programs. During the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have rescinded criminal penalties for possessing drug paraphernalia, items such as clean syringes and fentanyl test strips.
That means the Houston Harm Reduction Alliance operates in a “legal gray area,” said Malish. Although it has tacit support from the Houston police and other local entities, the nonprofit could face trouble if it strayed into a neighboring city.
“Programs that facilitate addictions by providing the tools people need to continue using drugs are not helping our community,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, wrote to KHN in an email. In February, Cruz criticized Biden’s grant program by saying it would fund “crack pipes for all” in a retweet of a story on a conservative website. Fact checkers debunked the story’s claim, but it continues to provide fodder to opponents of harm reduction practices in state and local governments, even in places where overdose deaths are quickly rising.
Louisiana allows local officials to decide whether to authorize syringe exchange programs, but only four of the state’s 64 parishes allow the services. “We know in the public health space how these programs save lives,” said Nell Wilson, project director for Louisiana’s Opioid Surveillance initiative. “But being a more conservative state, a lot of the problem is battling against wide-ranging misconceptions not based in fact.”
In Kentucky, local public health departments run harm reduction programs, said James Thacker, a program manager at the University of Kentucky’s harm reduction initiative. In some parts of the state, local law enforcement agencies support programs. In others, they enforce laws that consider fentanyl test strips illegal drug paraphernalia.
Still, state and local harm reduction groups say the Biden administration’s $30 million grant isn’t enough money to expand their programs to reach the number of people who need help.
“We were disappointed by that number,” said Cate Graziani, co-executive director of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, which sought the maximum $400,000 in funding but wasn’t among the two dozen organizations to receive grants. Her group planned to distribute the funds to local outposts such as the Houston Harm Reduction Alliance.
“These programs are still running on a shoestring,” said Leo Beletsky, a public health law expert at Northeastern University. “That is not how public health is supposed to be done.”
Advocates for harm reduction don’t believe such efforts alone will suddenly halt overdose deaths. Addiction is a complicated, chronic disease. And in 2021, overdose deaths jumped 15% from a year earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, illegal fentanyl and its analogs from Mexico and China have tainted the street supply of counterfeit pills, heroin, and even stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, causing both casual users and those with long-term addiction to overdose and die.
“No one thing is going to solve the overdose crisis, but this is going to save a lot of people’s lives,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said about harm reduction efforts.
Many of Malish’s clients talk about wanting to quit drugs. People who use syringe services programs are five times as likely to start treatment and three times as likely to stop using drugs, according to the CDC.
As Malish drove Hess past the Value Village to the abandoned strip mall where she usually lives, she said she plans to start methadone treatment for heroin addiction as soon as she can get an ID the city offers to people without housing.
“I’m so sick of seeing my friends die,” said Hess.
When she got out of Malish’s car, he loaded her arms with boxes of syringes, sterile water, injectable naloxone, tourniquets, and fentanyl test strips for her to share with others.
Hess then asked Malish if she could take two quarters she found in the seat cushions of his car to buy drinking water, before walking through the mall’s double doors.
The research explores nurses’ values, perceptions, and perspectives on MAiD and demonstrates a need for more guidance on the expectations of the nurse’s role to provide competent and quality care where MAiD is legalized.
“Nurse respondents to the study held concerns about the process, policy, potential psychological harm, legal risk, and the need to learn more about MAiD,” said Bosek, an associate professor and registered nurse. The findings suggest that nurse educators should assist nursing students to understand both their personal and professional values related to the subject, added Bosek.
“Organizations in states where MAiD is a legal option need to assist nurses to understand MAiD and carefully construct policy/standards to minimize conflict, moral distress, and psychological harm amongst nurses,” said Bosek.
MAiD is currently legal in 10 states including Vermont, plus Washington D.C., and legislation is pending in Connecticut, Arizona, and Massachusetts.
Bosek was part of the team that drafted the 2019 American Nurses Association (ANA) position statement, The Nurse’s Role When a Patient Requests Medical Aid in Dying, which addresses the growing ethical questions and challenges that nurses face when responding to a patient’s request for MAiD.
Oftentimes, social or economic disadvantages prevent a person from living their healthiest life. Last year, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) announced grant funding to support projects that focus on the impact of such health disparities on those with diabetes.
Louise Reagan, MS, APRN, ANP-BC, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing, received one of those grants — called the Health Disparities and Diabetes Innovative Clinical or Transitional Science Award — as her research focuses on people with diabetes who are reentering society from prison.
Reagan says her team has found that people living with diabetes in prison lack critical knowledge and skills regarding managing their diabetes. As these individuals transition to the community, they are required to self-manage diabetes independently and are not prepared to do so.
Diabetes survival and self-management skills include knowing what foods to eat, how to control blood glucose (sugar), when to take insulin, how to manage sick days, and how to access health care. These skills are critical for incarcerated individuals, as their rate of diabetes diagnosis is almost 50% higher than the general population.
“I wanted to figure out what we could do to reach persons with diabetes at this critical transition period when they’re just getting out of prison and into the community, and how we could help them self-manage their illness,” Reagan says. “The Connecticut Department of Correction (CDOC), a community collaborator and advocate for the needs of persons transitioning from prison to the community, and my team don’t want citizens returning to the community from prison to end up in the emergency room being treated for hypoglycemia or dangerously low blood glucose when it can be prevented.”
Reagan worked as an advanced practice registered nurse in Hartford for 16 years, treating underserved populations with multiple comorbid diseases, including diabetes. This clinical work exposed her to the challenges that people released from prison or living in supervised community housing post-prison release face in self-managing their illness when reentering the community, and inspired her research.
She says many social barriers prevent patients from adequately caring for their own health. It can be challenging to provide diabetes education to recently released patients due to their multiple housing locations, desire for anonymity, and limited access to clinical care.
Additionally, she says, the priorities of people recently released from prison are often to avoid reentering prison, to find a job, and reestablish social and family relationships rather than manage their diabetes and other aspects of their health.
“Patients have many other competing needs when integrating into their societal roles,” Reagan says. “The Diabetes LIVE JustICE research provides an opportunity to help them with their health.”
Her study — called Diabetes Learning in Virtual Environments Just in Time for Community reEntry (Diabetes LIVE JustICE) — examines the feasibility and acceptability of a mobile app that provides diabetes education, support, and other resources in a virtual environment to people recently released from prison living in supervised community housing or on parole. Reagan’s goal is to improve health outcomes and reduce health inequities for this vulnerable population.
Reagan’s app, called LIVE Outside, contains live sessions with diabetes educators and instructive games to inform users about self-care.
Over the course of 12 weeks, Reagan will be measuring users’ diabetes knowledge, stress, and self-care after using LIVE Outside and comparing it to typical diabetes care education.
The mobile app is a culmination of projects Reagan has been working on since completing her postdoctoral fellowship at New York University. There, she served as a project director for an R01 study using a personal computer-based virtual environment called Diabetes LIVE, which promoted diabetes education to community-dwelling individuals.
Reagan’s proceeding research project with the CDOC, Diabetes Survival Skills (DSS), was an in-person intervention run within CDOC-managed correctional facilities. However, this project experienced attrition as individuals reentered society and could no longer participate, she says.
With collaboration and support from the Connecticut Department of Correction, Reagan anticipated taking in-person DSS interventions beyond prisons to supervised housing facilities to reach recently released individuals. This intervention, however, was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This forced Reagan to get creative with her work, leading to her innovation and the ADA grant.
“I was thinking about my work, and I wondered, ‘what if we use a virtual environment and adapt it to a mobile environment?’ ” Reagan says. “We could adapt the virtual app, use my program from the Diabetes Survival Skills, and blend them into a mobile app.”
Given the need for diabetes self-management education during the critical transition from prison to the community, the CDOC was excited to work with Reagan again to develop a remote mobile option for the people with diabetes under their care. Reagan then collaborated with her colleagues from Diabetes LIVE — Constance Johnson (UTHealth Houston), Allison Vorderstrasse (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Stephen Walsh (UConn School of Nursing) — to combine DSS and Diabetes LIVE into a mobile app.
Diabetes LIVE JustICE was created and Reagan applied for the ADA grant to propel her innovation forward.
“My team and I had been talking about making this app mobile,” Reagan says. “The grant allows us to put all our work together to collaborate on this new idea.”
Reagan says she is grateful to have received this grant and for the strong collaboration with and involvement of the CDOC.
“When I received notice that the project was going to be funded, it was just an unbelievable feeling,” she says. “For me, this grant meant I had the opportunity to help underserved populations with their health, and I am so grateful for that. I feel so thankful that we can offer something to these people that sometimes don’t have anything.”
This research is supported by an American Diabetes Association grant #11-21-ICTSHD-05 Health Disparities and Diabetes Innovative Clinical or Translational Science Award. To learn more about the grant program, visit professional.diabetes.org. To learn more about the UConn School of Nursing, visit nursing.uconn.edu and follow the School on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Nurses care for patients with asthma exacerbated by poor air quality and heat exhaustion during heat waves. They respond during natural disasters like hurricanes and flooding. Now, a growing number of nursing schools are incorporating an underlying driver of these health issues into their courses: climate change and the environment. Their goal is to prepare nurses to better care for patients and communities in a world with a changing climate.
At NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, faculty have developed content focused on climate change and the environment for several courses. In 2020, the college added a module on the clinical relevance of climate change in health care decision-making to the applied epidemiology course for Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students, and the following year added modules on the environment for the health policy-focused course for PhD and DNP students.
Beginning this fall (2022), NYU Meyers will devote a brand-new course to climate and environmental health: The Environment and Health of Populations. The course is designed for graduate nursing students, but undergraduate students can enroll with permission from professors.
Historically, nurses may have learned about air quality and its effects on respiratory health, but haven’t necessarily been taught to care about dirt and water sources, which can become contaminated or carry pathogens, putting communities at risk. New coursework focused on climate might cover issues such as disaster preparedness, severe weather and health (for instance, protecting older adults during storm-related flooding or rising temperatures and infectious diseases) and sustainability in healthcare.
Robin Klar, DNSc, RN, a clinical associate professor at NYU Meyers who focuses on the environmental context for nurses in the U.S. and around the world, said that this growing interest in climate change demonstrates nursing education’s eye on the future—as healthcare evolves, so does how we train nurses. “Nursing is not static; it’s a dynamic profession,” said Klar.
NYU Meyers is one of 53 schools currently taking part in the Nurses Climate Challenge, a national campaign to mobilize nurses to educate 50,000 health professionals on the impacts of climate change on human health. Thus far, the movement has reached nearly 36,000 health professionals, including more than 15,000 nursing students.
Historically, nurses may have learned about air quality and its effects on respiratory health, but haven’t necessarily been taught to care about dirt and water sources, which can become contaminated or carry pathogens, putting communities at risk. New coursework focused on climate might cover issues such as disaster preparedness, severe weather and health (for instance, protecting older adults during storm-related flooding or rising temperatures and infectious diseases) and sustainability in healthcare.