With advanced education and extensive experience caring for patients and their families, family nurse practitioners are equipped to serve as advocates by providing a much-needed voice for patients, their communities, their profession, and perhaps just as important, themselves. Here are some examples of how nurses are serving as advocates on a variety of levels.
Popular perception holds that individual choices dictate a person’s weight: Those who eat well and prioritize fitness are healthy, and those who do not, are not. However, developing research on childhood obesity suggests that obesity levels are not caused by lifestyle choices - they are intimately linked to genetics and poverty rates.
The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro raised a lot of questions about public health, including some we may not have expected. Are healthier nations more successful in international athletic competitions? What does it really mean to be healthy? The Human Development Index gives us one possible answer.
Discrimination in the United States has historically cut a wide swath across a number of demographics, including race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability and religion. Despite a major cultural and political shift through the implementation of the long overdue Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other efforts at fighting discrimination, we still see it today — particularly in the form of modern-day racism.
When a health epidemic takes root, poor and underserved communities tend to experience the most severe consequences. The mosquito-borne Zika virus poses similar challenges on a global scale. Here in the U.S., doctors and nurses who serve low-income and rural patients are looking to early prevention and better access to testing to stem the tide.
Read on to learn more about Dr. O'Neill and her views on the evolution of the nursing profession, the format of Nursing@USC and advice for nursing students.
The dangers of lead contaminations are well known. Federal guidelines exist to ensure the safety of water supplies across the nation, but in Flint, Michigan — and numerous other municipalities all over the country — a number of overlapping socioeconomic factors complicated the issue to put residents in harm's way.
The University of Southern California (USC) School of Social Work is now accepting applications for Nursing@USC, a new online Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) for aspiring family nurse practitioners (FNPs).
