A Crucial Public Health Lesson: Let the Women Speak

” . . . people have their own hope and power which they need to discover.”

Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN.

Do some public health projects fail to live up to their ambitions because they were conceived in a conference room rather than in dialogue with those they are trying to help? It seems possible. Terms like client or community “buy-in” are now fashionable, but maybe what’s really meant by such terms is that people are given a chance to state their needs and their concerns ahead of time. And that someone is listening.

In this month’s Reflections essay by nurse practitioner Mark Darby, he remembers a valuable lesson once imparted to him through example by a Dominican priest. “Shut Up and Let the Women Speak” doesn’t flatter the younger version of the author who once visited the Dominican Republic on a medical mission. […]

2017-12-11T08:37:50-05:00December 11th, 2017|Nursing, nursing stories, Public health|0 Comments
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Where Medicine Leaves Off

Long before we see the face, we hear the crying. Mournful, broken, it expresses general discomfort more than acute pain. In it lies the anxiety of all those children brought here against their will, made to submit to the probing of pale strangers who speak an alien tongue.

AftertheScienceIllustrationThat’s the start of the May Reflections essay, “After the Science,” by Charlie Geer, about working as a medical translator on an Episcopal church–sponsored team in the Dominican Republic. Geer, who published a comic novel in 2005, writes with sensitivity about the limits of medicine and the way the “nurses gather round, the compassion that brought them to medicine picking up where medicine leaves off.”—JM, senior editor

2016-11-21T13:07:35-05:00May 17th, 2013|Nursing|1 Comment
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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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