Me, Responsible?

My advice is don’t leave it to clinical staff in hospitals to teach nursing students about health equity.?Are our future nurse leaders learning enough about health equity in academic learning centers or are we relying too much on the real life experience part of nursing to teach them??

A nursing student shared with me about an experience she had during clinical wherein a nurse told a black mom who was being discharged that she shouldn’t sleep with her baby in the bed because black moms are more likely to kill their baby by rolling over on them.?She said nothing to the white mom being discharged. The problem with relying on real life experiences is that when the time comes to stop biases like this and provide equitable care, nursing students aka our future nurse leaders, won’t know what to say or how to handle it.?

Without helping nursing students to connect the dots that the nurse in this situation was biased against black moms,?they rely on false beliefs about patients that may endanger their health. As nurse faculty, it is our responsibility to help them connect the dots so they have an appreciation for the conditions that create a burden of disease that is so high in vulnerable groups. In my years of training nursing students, I have found that many of them share the lack of opportunities to practice equitable care.?According to the CDC, health equity is the state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.?Achieving this requires ongoing societal efforts to:

• Address historical and contemporary injustices;
• Overcome economic, social, and other obstacles to health and health care; and Eliminate preventable health disparities.?
• To put it simply, health equity education should begin the moment a nursing student applies to nursing school and become a lifelong journey.??