See You Now Podcast

In this episode, we meet nurse anesthetist, founder and CEO of Diversity in Nurse Anesthesia Mentorship Program, Wallena Gould, EdD, CRNA, FAAN, whose personal experiences led to a recognition of the scope and root problems that prevent innovation from being impactful or scaled, which led to a body of work that has been applied across healthcare to forge a more equitable future.

Flattening the curve. Testing and contact tracing. Social distancing. Not only have these practices become part of our daily routines, but they are also the primary tools of the public health emergency response to COVID-19. In this episode, we meet Kathleen Blaney, MPH, RN, Director of Disease Control Emergency Preparedness at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Kathleen recounts the story of building the NYC Test & Trace Corps, a public health initiative to fight the threat of COVID-19 and one of the largest contact tracing endeavors in modern history, which in a matter of weeks trained and onboarded over 3,000 new contact tracers—remotely. She shares how the highly personal nature of contact tracing can strengthen science literacy and vaccine confidence, reduce health disparities, and even help build trust in both public institutions and each other amid the pandemic and beyond.

In this episode, we meet indigenous nurse researcher John Lowe, RN, PhD, FAAN, and discover how he is addressing the long-standing structural impediments that have kept American Indian, Alaska Native and indigenous youth from connecting to their cultural heritage, native identity, and to a history that he describes as a source of great strength. John established the first Center for Indigenous Nurse Research For Health Equity where he is innovating on ancestral wisdom and tradition—through practices like the Virtual Talking Circle—to enable indigenous youth to move away from harmful behaviors and move toward lives and coping mechanisms that are both positive and strength-based.

The CDC reports that Black mothers die at three to four times the rate of White mothers and that the mortality rate of Black infants is higher than that of any other ethnic group in the U.S. Regardless of income and education level, childbirth for Black women is more dangerous than it is for White women. In this episode, we hear from three healthcare innovators who personally and professionally—as Black women and advisors to the Black Mamas Matter Alliance—work tirelessly to advance policy grounded in human rights and reproductive justice to improve Black maternal health and lives.

During a public health crisis, such as COVID-19, we are acutely aware of the connections between social justice, public health and innovation—especially in communities with vast disparities, such as those in Alaska where Tim Struna, MPH, RN, practices. To explore how public health nurses are innovating to respond to the unique challenges of the ongoing pandemic, we talk to Tim, Chief of Public Health Nursing in the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. He is focused on increasing access to health services for residents in rural areas, particularly during COVID-19, by innovating and coordinating health practices at a community level.

Have questions for the SEE YOU NOW team? Feedback? Future episode ideas? Contact us at hello@seeyounowpodcast.com.

Around the globe, nurses are actively innovating to improve the health, safety, and wellbeing of citizens, environments, and entire communities in settings that some might not have considered—our state legislatures. The link between nursing, politics, and innovation might not seem obvious, but for the nurses who have ushered in meaningful legislation—the relationship is a natural one. In this wide-ranging conversation with Delaware Lt.Gov, Bethany Hall-Long, we discover how nurses involved with legislation at the local, state, and federal level is innovation.

In this episode, Karen Murphy, PhD, RN, executive VP, chief innovation officer and founder of the Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger offers the thirty thousand foot view of enterprise-level innovation at a scale and pace that was once thought of as too hard, too risky, and just not possible.

COVID-19 has changed the way we do almost everything—not just in healthcare settings, but in settings of all kinds. With reactivation and recovery being keywords in everyone's inboxes, now more than ever, we need designers steeped in public health to help us reimagine a safe and healthy return to social life in a pandemic environment. In this episode, nurse and service designer Brittany Merkle, MFA, RN, shares how she, alongside a multidisciplinary team, were able to create a game plan and playbook for returning to school, work, and play safely.

In this episode, we meet Danielle Bastien RN, DNP, FNP-BC, a nurse practitioner at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan who researched and explored human trafficking and how health systems, and nurses specifically, can identify and protect victims, help them find a way out, and a safer, more secure path forward.

In this episode, nurses Carlos Trochez, Jr., BSN, RN and Simone Hannah-Clark, BN, RN, CCRN two of the many thousands of nurses working in intensive care units around the world, reflect on the intensity and pace of real-time innovation in a pandemic and reveal how crowdsourcing from social media, collaborating across cultures and disciplines, and live choreography played a role in all the pieces coming together—and how they are present and highly attuned when the pieces, for some patients and families, fall apart.