Coming Home to Nursing: A Career Change Eases a Return to a Small Town

“Working as a nurse in the county where your family has lived for seven generations has a social complexity that can’t be prepared for.”

The Reflections essay in the September issue of AJN isn’t focused on a dire clinical situation, a wrenching ethical quandary, or a challenging coworker or boss. Called “Coming Home to Nursing,” the essay describes the many ways becoming a nurse helped the author begin to feel a sense of belonging when she returned to her small town. Here’s the opening:

Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved. Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved.

I had been taking care of people, in one way or another, for as long as I could remember, first growing up in Maine and then for 20 years in New York City. I had returned to my small town to help care for my mother, who had end-stage Parkinson’s disease. After she died, I felt a void. I looked around at this tiny place, where people are considered to be “from away” even if they’ve lived here for multiple generations. I wondered what I had to give back to the supportive community I’d grown up a part of—and I also wondered if I could fit in after 20 years away. Could I turn my love of taking care […]

2016-11-21T13:02:02-05:00September 8th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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As with Ebola Outbreak, Social Determinants of Health Crucial in Recent Rural U.S. HIV Outbreak

Rachel Parrill, PhD, RN, APHN-BC, is an associate professor of nursing at Cedarville University in Ohio

by banditob/flickr creative commons by banditob/flickr creative commons

This past fall, with the world watching, a crisis unfolded in West Africa that challenged our understanding of sociocultural environments, epidemiology, and health. The spread of Ebola and the intercontinental transmission of the disease exposed weaknesses in our epidemiological defense system. It also drew attention to the powerful role that cultural beliefs and practices can have on disease transmission during outbreaks.

In that same time frame, and with similar cultural etiologies, another infectious crisis played out much closer to home. The setting: the rural Midwest, in and around the small town of Austin, Indiana. The disease: HIV. The crisis: an unprecedented outbreak—one with incidence rates (up to 22 new cases a day at the height of the outbreak) estimated to be higher than those in many sub-Saharan African nations and transmission rates through injection drug use higher than in New York City. Contributing to this “perfect storm” were socioeconomic factors characteristic of many rural settings, including poverty, low education levels, limited access to health care, and few recreational or employment opportunities.

In my work as a faculty member in a rural Midwest setting, I introduce undergraduate and graduate nursing students to concepts of public health nursing and try to provide […]

2016-11-21T13:02:06-05:00August 25th, 2015|infectious diseases, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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