Rose Hoban, health care journalist, at AJN offices in NYC

Rose Hoban, health care journalist, at AJN offices in NYC

AJN editors met yesterday for lunch with the health care journalist Rose Hoban, who currently works for North Carolina Public Radio (WUNC). She worked for 10 years as a nurse, has a degree in (and a passion for) public health, and has done some powerful stories of late on global health issues—including one she described to us, wrenching details included, about reproductive health issues in Zambia (here’s a page where you can listen to the story).

Here’s a site at which Hoban vividly narrates, with photos, her journalistic work in Africa. In person, she’s sharp, funny, compassionate, and interested not just in global public health issues but in public health issues here in the United States. She used to work for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, of which she says that “most of the projects are, on many levels, run by nurses” (partly, she says, to keep specialist physicians free to practice their specialties).

About nursing education in the U.S., Hoban has this to say: “My biggest problem with nursing education in the U.S. is that so much is drummed into you about what you cannot do.”

Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

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