Amplify Nursing

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. Dawn Bent, program administrator of the DNP-Nurse Anesthesia Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Nursing.

As a faculty at Penn Nursing, Dr. Bent has mentored numerous nursing students, and she continues to inspire and support them through the many clinical and academic rigors that they face.

Dr. Bent talks with us about the significance mentorship plays in nursing education, the parallels between athletics and leadership, and the importance of promoting diversity among nurse anesthesia faculty.

Today on Amplify Nursing, we talk with Dr. Julie Fairman, Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Dr. Fairman is a renowned nurse historian who has made significant contributions in studying how 20th-century healthcare issues have influenced current nursing and health care trends. Her remarkable career has sparked a new paradigm for studying the history of health care and health policy, with her current research focusing on the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Fairman talks with us about the nuances involved with studying the history of healthcare, the role of nurses in addressing structural racism and social injustice, and how historical perspectives shape the landscape of healthcare practice and policy today.

Today we talk with Dr. Hafeeza Anchrum, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society (PRSS). Curious about the history of nurses that shared her experiences, she recently completed a doctoral degree capturing the oral history of black nurses and their struggle for equality during the civil rights movement.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, as a child of a mother of the civil rights movement, Dr. Anchrum understood the need to preserve these stories due to a scarcity of historical scholarship focused on black nurses.

We talk with Dr. Anchrum about her early experiences in the profession, the inequities baked into the education system, and who gets to tell the history of nursing, what is being taught, and whose work is celebrated.

On the next episode of the Amplify Nursing podcast, we talk with Ravenne Aponte. Ravenne is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing focusing her research on the history of black nurses. Ravenne started her educational career with a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies with a minor in Health Disparities and then received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, working as a Pediatric ICU nurse. It was the combination of these experiences that lead to her interest in nursing history and workforce diversity that ultimately lead her to co-create the Nurses You Should Know (NYSK) project. Nurses You Should Know, is a social media and digital campaign whose goal is to elevate the stories of nurses of color and to make their impact more widely known.

We talk with Ravenne about how her educational, clinical, and life experiences contributed to the work she does today, the disconnect between nursing history and practice, and how she is using the NYSK project to highlight the work nurses of color have done - and are doing - to contribute to the nursing profession.

On our next episode, we talk with Tarik Khan, a nurse practitioner, doctoral student at Penn Nursing, and the president of the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association. Tarik’s work focuses not just on making his patients' lives better but on making the profession better, and he does this in a variety of ways including volunteering on the ground during the pandemic and pushing bills through the state legislature in his role with PSNA. We talk with him about his work with the Philadelphia Medical Reserve Corp, alongside his mom, a fellow nurse, his goals for the future, and the need to unleash the power of nurses.