Welcome to the podcast, Monica. We are so excited. You've been on my list for a long time. Then where it pushed me over was we ended up in the same room, and I hadn't made the connection of who you were. This is such a cute story. We were both teaching at A1 California, and I had gone up and done a whole shindig on physiologic birth. You came up to me and were like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much, spot on." You were so complimentary and so kind. You were like, "Yes, I'm speaking next." I'm like, "Okay, amazing."
You were just so nice. You get up. I remember you said like, "I dedicate my whole talk to Sarah because she set me up so well for what I'm going to say." Then it hit me in the audience like a ton of bricks. I was like, I am so embarrassed. I am such an idiot. I am talking to this like genius mastermind of our industry. I just had this whole interaction where I was like, "Oh," foot in mouth. We are here today having a little Happy Hour conversation with Dr. McLemore. We're going to get Monica today because we're pretending like we're at drinks together for this Happy Hour conversation.
Welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to have you. I hope it's the first of many conversations to bring you to this place.
Monica McLemore: Oh, thank you. I am actually so glad to be here because, like I told you in person, you teamed me up beautifully and everything you had to say was spot on. I think the podcast and the work that you do is just so important. We've been a mutual constellation because of our association with A1. Really, I am one of these low key people that, Dr. McLemore has her own persona. Anyway, it tells you, I'm a very serious scientist. I'm a very serious clinician. I'm an intensely goofy person. Me, I will walk randomly through events or places where I'm supposed to talk or whatever.
It's fun being anonymous until somebody actually calls me up somewhere. I do that on purpose because I don't want people to be intimidated to talk to me. I don't want to ever get bigger than my britches, as my mother would say. I always want to be a strong learner. In order to do that, that means you have to be welcoming, you have to listen to other people, you have to acknowledge their perspective. You have to be curious. No need to be embarrassed. I actually was so enamored with your presentation style, as well as you wrote a lot of complex material for people in ways that I thought was very accessible and truth-telling. I am a big fan of yours as well.
Sarah: Thank you so much. It's so fun to be able to finally have this conversation with you. For those that don't know you, will you just give them a background and an introduction into who you are, where you've been, what you do?
Monica: Yes, because different audiences know me in different ways. It's very obvious to me, because I've been myself my whole life. When people start to encounter my work, especially if they're coming in from some random touchpoint, it's not a cogent narrative for them. Let me sort of walk it through. I was a preemie in 1969. I am 55 years old, and I've been a nurse since 1993, since I was 20 years old. I've never done anything else for pay. I worked as a home health aide and a clinic assistant before I became a nurse. I worked for Interim Healthcare, which was a home visiting agency.
I worked for the Visiting Nurses Association as a home health aide, both in high school. Nobody in my family is or was in health care at that time. I grew up on the East Coast. A lot of people know me from the West Coast. I've lived there for 38 years, but I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. I went to the College of New Jersey, did my baccalaureate degree in nursing, and worked at the hospital Mercer Medical Center, which no longer exists. It was bought out by Capital Health, and then Robert Wood Johnson, New Jersey. I worked at the hospital I was born at.
For me, nursing-- part of it was because I was a preemie, I was so sick, I spent a lot of time with nurses, it took a long time to go home, that I kept saying, and I was a sickly child, that if I ever survived all of that, nursing was the thing I wanted to devote my life to, and that's why I'm a nurse. Then, of course, I've only worked in reproductive health rights and justice my entire career.
I don't like to say OB nurse, labor nurse, delivery nurse, all those things, because I have learned, and I've always had an aversion to that, that our employers don't dictate to us who we are. I'm a nurse. I am a life nurse.
Sarah: Yes, you are.
Monica: I have nursing licenses in five states. I live by the American Nurses Association's code of ethics. We have our new one out, it just came out in January. I've commented on our code of ethics that we update every 10 years since 1995. I take nursing very seriously, but I'm also a molecularly trained branch scientist. My dissertation was on [unintelligible 00:06:02] ovarian, and I'm a public health person. My master's in public health. I don't function as an advanced practice clinician. A lot of people think I am one, but I'm not.
It was so funny, because when I was working with my PhD at the University of California, I was still working [unintelligible 00:06:18]. The physicians always wanted to address me. They thought it was so cute that I was a doctor-nurse, or a budding doctor-nurse. They would want to call me Dr. McLemore in the clinical environment. I said that's not appropriate. I said I'm a nurse here, I have no expertise with it, and why are we confusing patients? I get that you're trying to show me a sign of preference, sorry for that, but it's confusing in this environment.
For me, I care deeply about the reproductive trajectory, and I just don't mean anything. I like the reproduction of ideas, the reproduction of opportunities, the reproduction of wonder, the reproduction of surprise. We talk about reproductive justice as if it's just about the propagation of the human species, but it really isn't. It applies to every existential thing that we experience as humans. In my mind, because everything was made up, we can remake everything the way we want to. People get tired of stuff, like the immaculate conception or whatever.
Everything has been made up, and it can be made up. I am a very nursy nurse. Right now, I am a visiting professor at the Rory Myers College of Nursing at New York University. I'm super excited. My materials are making their way through appointment promotion and tenure. A lot of people have asked me, "Why are you a visiting professor?" I say, because I came in off-cycle, and anybody who understands anything about academia would know that then you have to go through all the machinery to actually get on the regular cycle of it.
Then I have other people who they ask me why am I leaving the West Coast. They think it's like being for some crazy thing. Quite frankly, it's personal. My parents, who have been married for 62 years, still live in the house I grew up in, and I'm coming back to help. I let people believe whatever they want about me because if you don't have the courage to come talk to me or even ask me a question, then you've already shown me a piece of what faction of health care you fit in.
Sarah: Tell me more about that.
Monica: That's why I love my interaction with you, right? For novice nurses, early career nurses, hospital nurses, verified nurses, whatever moniker you want to use, I'm a nurse's nurse. I don't care what your credentials are. I don't care what you are. I hang with nurses who don't even have licenses. I work with Jennie Joseph, who's one of the premier Black British midwives. She has no credentials there. Yet, she's been doing incredible work for a very long time, right? This whole thing, what I mean by that, is a lot of times people are-- I don't know how we got this way. Maybe it's proximity and position.
We have people who want to impress, people who want to have me do things. It's not like, do you want a nurse curiosity interest in our shared commitment to our life of service? I take that very seriously. I don't care what your education [unintelligible 00:09:32]. I don't care what divisions you have. If you understand nursing in the most basic fundamental ways that our [unintelligible 00:09:39] is of service, it is a gift to be able to care for people. That curiosity, how you meet people, whatever they are, the very basic fundamentals of nursing, then we can have it.
One of the reasons why I think my reputation is so well deserved is because people know-- like the way you even talked about how we met each other, is the way I move up. I don't know, I'm not an ivory tower academic. I took the bus to where I currently live. I live in communities where I work. I don't take on a traditional academic person. That said, in our saying, one of the reasons why I keep being a professor, and one of the reasons I keep doing it future, is because I'm really grumpy that I personally never had a Black professor when I was a learner until I got to my master's program. That was at the end of my master's program.
I was already 28 years old and had a degree in nursing. That's not okay. For me, nurses who work in labor and delivery, post-partum, inter-partum, abortion, senior, conization, Planned Parenthood, whatever, wherever you work, clinically, in the reproductive spectrum, in my opinion, are the guardian of our culture. The guardian of our future brain trust. The shepherd of reverence for bringing new humans to this place. It's a special role that we have. Not just because of birth and baby, right? Pregnancy in and of itself, and I say this all the time, birth is one outcome of pregnancy. There are others.
People who do this work, you are watching folks transform their own lives with one decision. They are transforming their future with one decision. Whether it's the relationship with the co-parent or the fact that there will be another human being in their life that they're legally, emotionally, spiritually, biologically tethered to. You changing your whole existence and your relationship with the constellation of other human beings around you. You are changing your social position. People don't even think about it like that.
When we do, it is so important that we remember that folks' lives are changed, for the better or the worse, based on the decision around what reproductive trajectory they want to manifest in their life.
Sarah: How does that position impact how you carry yourself through your work?
Monica: That's an excellent question and I really appreciate it. First of all, I am a childless by choice lady. I knew when I was eight years old, the idea of parenthood was really a weird one, because it requires skills that I quite frankly wasn't interested in. My comportment with the world is as a childless by choice person who has been to 54 births, I've been to-- I can't even tell you how many abortions I've been to, I've been to infertility treatment and done procedural cessation for egg retrieval. I have done it all, oncology.
The way that I show up is that everybody's reproductive trajectory is different because everybody's life circumstances are different. It is a fundamental lie to say that there is one default way to be an adult, to be a human, and to be able to have a legitimized reproductive trajectory. I would fundamentally reject that. It makes it very easy for me to care for queer people and trans folks who want to be parents. It makes it very easy for me to support people who really want to be parents but don't have the physiological capacity to do so.
It makes it really easy for me to help people not be pregnant who don't want to be. I have no emotional attachment to what other people do, decide, or choose because I recognize they are the experts of their own lives. I don't have any particular information that is relevant to their decision making except for the clinical sequelae associating it with whatever they're deciding. I'm purposively not using the word risk because I think the word risk is bullshit. Oh, can I press on here? I'm sorry.
Sarah: Yes, go for it.
Monica: Monica is a body now.
Sarah: We're at the same. I try to hold back, but we're at Happy Hour.
Monica: I'm at the point where we need to call out the lies. Anybody who has an emotional investment in another person's reproductive trajectory and their decision making is buying into a very fundamental lie. It's the same lie that we say that aggregate statistics can tell you nothing about your own individual risk. Your individual decision about your reproductive trajectory is not responsible, whether it's alcohol or sex. If you look at anti-abortion, if you look at the demographic that have shown that people are having less children, if you look at the language around all of those things, it's a panic narrative grounded in a lot.
You have people that will tell you, my fundamental worth is irrelevant as a child, that's my choice. That is a lie. We have to stop buying into the lie that any one person's reproductive trajectory contributes or over contributes to public health problems or societal issues. The way that I approach it as a clinical nurse, because-- and again, this is why I really try to talk to early career nurses and all nurses who have been in hospital because that's where the majority of people who work are always worried about their reproductive health.
There's a whole other world that impacts the outcomes of pregnancy that have nothing to do with the clinical care it will provide. Birth is an episode. Postpartum is forever, as Chanel Albert-Porsche always says from Ancient Song doula. I like to give people credit with clinical do, I did not come up with it. Postpartum is forever. Birth is an episode. It's a moment. The idea that we tie a lot of things to birth-- I'll give you a perfect example of this. In my recent work, I do a lot of work in maternal morbidity, mortality, respectful care, all this other stuff.
To look at that at the moment of birth is too late. You had nine months of craziness. You had nine months of appointments, visits, poverty, environmental exposures, and maybe violence. You had a whole time. To try to address everything at the point of birth is why we're not seeing the effective intervention that we want to see. It's too late. In my mind, we need to rethink, not just individually how we approach those, but this is why community-centered care is so important because in aggregate, yes, reproductive trajectories matter.
In one individual decision that anybody makes, no, not, there's no way to part. I don't approach my work from an agenda of-- this is why I work with anybody. As long as you're not evil-- a lot of people look at me like, "Wait a minute, really, Monica?" I'm like, "Sure." We have to have very difficult conversations about the appropriate role of reproduction in our society and what health services are we prepared to organize, support, and train the future folks around. Because if your answer to that is, that's a personal responsibility. There is no state interest in any of this.
We need to cut essential programs like Medicaid that fund half births in the country. Okay, well, then what's the plan? We have to have those kinds of discussions. In addition to-- well, I don't think it's a good idea that when we reduce public dollars for health care access, when we know that health insurance is one of the number one interventions to improve health outcomes. Okay, walk me through more on that part. If health insurance in and of itself is an intervention, then we should talk about it like that. That's why you don't hear me use the word entitlement.
I make a distinction between employer sponsored health insurance, public insurance. It's technically accurate. If we want to see improved outcomes, then we're going to be looking at those non-clinical factors. It's one thing to say, you come to pregnancy older, sicker, fatter. You've got health conditions that predispose you to poor outcomes. What about poverty? That predisposes you to poor health outcomes. Do we really want to make an ethical argument that poor people shouldn't be able to parent? I don't think so. We need to think about this very differently.
The reason that nursing is so impactful and so important in having these discussions is we need to start to spend some of that most trusted of the health professions currency that we always say yes in leveraging the relationships that we have with communities. The problem is most nurses are ill prepared to talk about this in this way because they've been lied to. There's some false dichotomy or there's some false zero sum game. We don't have enough to clarify systems. We don't have enough. You have to be worthy to get things.
That's why people try to make a distinction between employee response to health insurance and public insurance. "Oh, you're lazy. You're not working. Therefore, you need public insurance." Whereas it's a state of luck that most of us have employee response to health insurance. Thank you, Hillary, for it. Labor unions, right? My role, my job, my work in reproductive health shelter and talking to labor and delivery, and antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum nursing, and those who work in abortion and family planning contraception.
My job is to get them to reconnect with the innate curiosity that the nursing skillset for them. When I say to people, when you look at high-performing hospitals, because people come into hospitals and healthcare for nursing care. If they wanted to come in to see clinicians, they would do what I'm doing right now. Well, you come to the hospital for nursing. When you look at high-performing institutions, the nurses that work in those institutions are well prepared. They are respected, they are working, functioning really greatly in a team, and that their provision of their care is invisible to most people.
I always say that that high-functioning, high-quality nursing care is like Olympic gymnastic. You don't see all the injuries, you don't see all the ugliness. You see the execution of excellence, and you know what I'm talking about. I'm purposely not using some of the language, because I actually don't think this less exclusively with things like magnet and academic medical center. I'm purposely not using that language. Because fundamental nurses who listen to this podcast, they know what I'm talking about.
When they have the tools to operationalize their brilliant, when they can function at the highest level of their licensure. That's not just about specific types of institutions. That is a leadership commitment to unleashing the power of fundamental nursing assessment. Asking questions, collaboration, teamwork, coordination, all the things that we do behind the team, and inhumane work that don't respect us. That's what I'm talking about. In my mind, labor and delivery nurses, birth center nurses, people who work in repro, we have a lot to teach the rest of healthcare because we understand some very fundamental things that need to happen.
We also are ground zero, though. When we have dysfunction, that's when you see pull up. We are the canary in the coal mine in nursing and anesthesia, and doulas and community members, and families come together to take care of a pregnant person. It's magical, it's reverent, it is imperial. When it doesn't work, it's a shit show. That's how I think about it. I have to say one other thing, and I think this is really important. Nursing is not defined by what we do. Skills and tasks do not make people an excellent, reasonably prudent expert nurse.
I don't care if you can put in somebody's IV with your eyes closed, upside down, hanging from the trap, really irrelevant, if you can't fit on the bed and hold a pregnant person's hand or hold their mama's hand, look them in the eye and say, you are going to do your best job to care for them today. If you can't do that, that's why-- I know we're not going to talk about this, but I have to say this too. That's why I hate AI. There's a lot of many reasons why I hate AI. Everybody in the mother jumping on AI. I'm always like, "I don't like AI families, and I don't like leftovers," because meal prep is different than leftover.
Fundamental basic nursing care is to meal prep. Since leftovers are to eat hot. I think very differently about these things. I think the way that we trained people, if you think about Dr. Benner's work, From Novice to Expert, I was lucky enough to study with her during my PhD [unintelligible 00:23:57]. I still think there are tenets of novice expert that need to be tweaked. Fundamentally, I actually think it's a really good framework because people are seeking touchpoints to be able to trust themselves.
One thing that I try to get nursing students to understand in the early career nurses days, instead of trusting yourself, why don't you jointly try to trust yourself and the foundational knowledge that you receive in your nursing education? I use my nursing education every day as a researcher, as a human, as a person, as a clinical provider of care. I use it every day because it has taught me-- I went to a liberal arts college of nursing. I use it every day.
I've worked at some of the most high-powered, incredible academic medical centers in the country, but the basic fundamentals of listening, communication, curiosity, assessment, connection, I use it every day.
Sarah: What I love about your perspective of hearing you talk is, one, I love hearing somebody who is so deep in this work, just still adore, and also, there's like a joy and privilege and reverence for the art of nursing. Rather than the tasks, it's like the embodiment of what a nurse can look like. I love that. I also love your emphasis on curiosity. We talk a lot about that around here. Somebody recently asked me for business because they're like, "Why do you think you're still here in business?" I'm like, "100% it's because of the nursing skills that I acquired as a bedside nurse, and prioritization, communication, people skills, and building rapport."
They asked me when I'm hiring, what do I look for the most? One of the top ones that keeps coming to the top is curiosity. That's why I have so many nurses on my team that aren't even-- they are functioning clinically, but they're not working at the bedside for me. They are curious learners in this community is so dedicated to being lifelong learners that-- it sounds like you would say that should be an attribute of all nurses. As a nurse, that's who we are, that's who we embody, and that's what we've committed to.
Monica: Absolutely. I will also say this, curiosity is the antidote to chaos. It just is. Whether it's anti-racism work, whether it's health equity work, whether it's disrespectful care, regardless of what it is, curiosity puts you in a position to be able to shift a frame in ways that allow for people to bring their gifts and talents forward. For me, curiosity allows you to do really interesting things that help other people to get out of whatever they're thinking about and think about something. My favorite curiosity for you, I practice this by the way, too, just like I practice makeup and a whole lot of other things.
I'm like, "Wow, that's really interesting. Could you say some more about that? Say more." "I don't know, I hadn't really thought about that. Can you add to that?" I say this all the time. Even when I'm stalling to get my own thoughts together. It's exactly the nursing skillset. I learned this in pharmacology. I don't know if you did. I was back before PIXIS and all those. You could be stalling to the core of it. If you're asking questions, then you could be looking up names.
One of the things I think that I try to teach early career nurses or students is, one thing we've lost from nursing skills is what do we have to do better about, is to curate curiosity, because when you have computers in your hand or a cell phone in your hand or whatever, and you have information that's readily available to you, it sometimes flattens the kinds of questions that you can ask, and it flattens the kind of response that you can get. It's almost the difference between open-endedness and being very focused.
Teaching people how to ask big questions that leave a multitude of responses available, that is a fundamental nursing skill set. Even when you look at the way that we go into it. "Hi, I'm Monica, I'm going to be your nurse today. How would you like for your care to go today?" If you ask that question, that's going to be real different than, "Okay, so I need to give you your medication at this time, this time, this time. You have this screening to do today. We're going to do your bath at this point in time. We're going to make sure you get your lunch straight."
A lot of times, patients and families are not going to know when to plug in with their preference. You walk in and like, "Hey, how's it going down today? What are you doing?" You automatically have bought in a partner. What that day is going to look like? Most likely without conflict. Curiosity for me has been-- because the other part of it is, curiosity allows for you to listen to uncomfortable things, which we do all the time as nurses. If I say to people, "Okay, well, we got meds, what's the plan?"
I'm not just blindly accepting that that's something we're going to do. I'm holding you accountable to then say, "All right, well, then what's the plan?" In my mind, curiosity is also an antidote for confusion. It's an antidote for panic and chaos. It's an antidote for fear and frustration because then you're calling people into a discussion about evolution or about different outcomes. That's why I love to. People are getting really good, liberal arts, undergraduate, baccalaureate, or accelerated nursing education.
Cultivating curiosity should be one of the competitive themes that we are looking to develop. Historically, people have called that questioning orders. That's the one place where you could really be like, "Oh, okay. Now, I can just connect the dots with the task ordinance, didn't I?" If you see an order and you're questioning it, you have curiosity. My job as a teacher is to help people to understand that the nursing skillset is applicable to many more things than just patients. Because in pregnancy, a lot of pregnant people don't even see themselves as patients. They don't even see themselves as the only patient.
You got to go involve the doula, the mama, the family, and the co-parents. In my mind, the work that we do is life. It is a natural fit criteria. It is a tragedy. I think a lot of times, many times we bought into the physician idea. Doulas once told me, my reasons, they are so important during pregnancy, labor, and birth is because they know how to move with people through time. Clinicians don't know how to manage time. Dr. Karen Scott talks about this with a good friend of mine all the time.
She says, "As an OB-GYN and as a physician, I'm trying to manage time, trying to manage labor and birth because my role has been [unintelligible 00:31:28]." Whether it's infection-- but we over-prioritize that piece versus how do you move with somebody through time? That was so transformational for me to think about.
Sarah: It's a very different approach and it impacts everything. Even if you think on a more personal perspective as well, "Am I managing time of my life," or, "Am I moving with those around me whether that be my patient, my family, whoever's with me through time?"
Monica: Yes, exactly.
Sarah: It changes your perspective on how you approach everything.
Monica: It's a both end. That's the other thing. Because you want to be managing your time as you need it. A lot of times, too many people see those two skills as one thing. It's actually two separate skills. One of the things I do want to say about, to the audience, thank you for doing the work that you do. It is a gift. It is an honor. I'm grateful. I know it may feel like in this current moment, especially with a lot of attention to maternal morbidity and mortality that, which are rare events that you're feeling very critiqued today, criticized, working really hard.
Our workplaces are inhumane. Those of us who collect data about this, especially around Black maternal health. We're not looking to judge or blame, or fire a nurse-- At some point, I think we should start firing people. That's a different conversation. It is this notion that you can't address a problem if you can't bring attention to it, if you're not aware of it. My research program, when I really started to pivot towards patients' experiences of their care, because that's really how I think about it. What are the factors?
I've been so frustrated over time because people always say that when you research nurses, that's me-search. That's not real research. That's not real fun. My whole point has always been, you are never going to improve health outcomes if you can't address the providers, the context, and the environment of that case. You can't just all of a sudden wave a magic wand, and pregnant people are going to have superior health outcomes. Not if you're committed to not blaming them. I don't like blaming pregnant people. That's like not a thing.
You have to address the constellation of things around pregnant people, if you come at it from the place where I went. My research program has never been to shame nurses or to belittle us. I love nursing. It's the only thing I've ever done to pay for [unintelligible 00:34:14] to go laughing. I'm going to do throw about and discipline under the bus. That's it. We have some work to do. I'm not the only person. There are other people who have studied nursing. I've seen people studying for-profit nursing schools and how predatory it can be. There's a lot of nursing education.
Yes, there are things that we can improve upon. There are things that we can correct. There are things that we can lift up. At the same time, we have to recognize the unique contribution. We sit between transition for individuals, families, and communities. How they adapt to-- I'm talking like my own emotions work. I'm old. I'm going to go back to maternal attachment theory and how people adapt to their new role, how they adapt. Most people don't know nothing about being a parent, even though they go to the classes and they be on the internet, and they do the whole nine yards. Shouldn't you be in that?
That's an experiential thing. To have grace around people in that moment is really important. Same way if people don't want that in their life. "Their life has been ruined by pregnancy. Oh my god." You have to give people grace to be able to be the experts in their own lives. If we ever decided that we wanted to nurse the nation, we could shut down all the polarity and vitriol that happens in this country. If we, as nurses, decided that it is important, necessary, and crucial, we cannot exist or function as a society without having dollars to be able to support pregnant people.
If we decided and spoke in one voice, we could actually fix-- one really extreme example could say that any academic medical center that has been impacted by the cut of federal funding will no longer be in a position to provide care, proactive, a lot of them are going to close anyway. You see people shutting down, at least in Washington state where I currently am. The Valley Medical Center is starting to lay folks off. This has already happened. Somehow, why is the layoff argument under capitalism acceptable, as opposed to say, we're actively not going to be providing care because we don't have the resources? Talk about the collective strike.
Sarah: Eh. I mean, good luck. How's that going to happen?
Monica: It's not, but you asked for an example. [unintelligible 00:36:44] Medical Center.
Sarah: Yes, it would work.
Monica: We rather take the spineless coward route. Allow for administrators to take the fall for laying people off because we don't have the money. If you're rich enough, you might survive and be the last one standing. If we really wanted the youth to collect their power of nothing and unleash that, we would all see that we were mistaken and not hoping to be the last one standing.
Sarah: Why do we have a stake in it?
Monica: Because if we're going to rebuild and reimagine to get good care for people, then action-- like any basic nursing education should teach people that action is required. Nursing is not a passive discipline or profession. We are not a sit by and watch group peep. We would have never gotten nurse family partnership. We would have never had centering and group prenatal care. We would have never had kangaroo maternity care. There's all sorts of innovations that we created that I will not seek ground on that came out of nursing, basic nursing.
Nursing is about action, about passively watching stuff happen or allowing injustice to occur. You got some people who don't even want to discuss it. What would be correct? What if Sigma Theta Tau honor society in nursing? What if the FAAN, the Academy of Nursing? What if AAN--? What if every nursing team, including the specialty organizations all came together? Not around nursing funding for education, but for basic community-based and clinical nursing care. Our job is to take care of widows, the children, and the poor. I don't care what religious tradition you come from.
Maybe it's time for us to admit that we just don't want to put our neck on the line and do that. That's supposed to be this remaking of cruelty of poor people is wrong. We need to be able to say that. Again, going back to reproductive justice. It's the reproduction of ideas and opportunities. Oh, I guess we just don't believe in the future capacity of human beings anymore, or the position that they find themselves in currently now is just static. As nurses, we don't feel any need to assist people in operationalizing their better future self. Nah, don't miss me with that.
Maybe this is why I was talking about workforce issues because we need to be more discerning in the health professions of who is worthy to serve the public as a nurse, because it is a life of service. I came up during HIV and AIDS, I trained in 1988 before universal precautions where a needle stick could get you killed. I remember that. Our preceptors who were also our in-classroom didactic nursing faculty worked with us side by side.
I asked them one, and they used to call us by our surnames and they said, "Ms. McLemore, if all of us are taken out by this virus, we need to know that the future of nursing is set so that people can get good, high quality, documentary evidence-based care." I was like, "All right. Well, you're right." I believe so strongly in the future that I want future nurses to understand what a life of service is. Not servitude. Serve to other humans.
Sarah: I think a lot of that has gotten lost. I'm listening to you talk about, how it was before and how we're training nurses, how we used to train nurses, the current state of society. I'm like, "Somewhere in there, something got lost." We're like, "You go back to the Florence Nightingales of the way nursing started, especially in OB, like the midwives of the past, or humans who cared for humans, that somewhere in there, we've lost a component of that." Then you talk about the way-- I think about all of us banding together, we are so separated, we're so siloed, and we are, we're afraid--
Monica: I don't know how true that is. I think that we're separated. I actually think that--
Sarah: Well, I think we think we're separated. What I'm hearing you say is that we're not, which therefore leads me to my next question, which is I'm thinking about our audience who feels that way. Thank you for correcting me. It feels like, "Ugh, who am I?" There's so many of these big issues, and what does it have to do with me? How is my work at all political? I just come to work to get paid and like help get a baby out safely, hopefully. I would love to hear your take on what we can-- for those that are like, "But I want to be involved. I feel inspired by all of this. What can I do?"
I think especially because you feel so siloed, it's like, "Where do I go? What do I start? How do I help? How do I participate? Where do I rally?"
Monica: Yes. Number one, that's legitimate because nursing is a job, and some people see it as getting the check, and that's okay. At the same time as a licensed person and as a citizen of the world, if you want to abdicate your responsibility to engage around the future, own that, and make sure you know that's your decision as opposed to some structural thing. There are three things that it's my job as a teacher to activate people to understand. Number one, whether or not our institutions are functioning appropriately. That's everything from Congress all the way to our professional organization.
Lack of participation will pretty much ensure that they don't function. The first thing I always tell people is if you're not participating in the process, you're a part of the problem. In my mind, I call my elected representatives every week with the same sentence. I need you to do your job. Please stop confirming people for offices that you say are going to close. Why are we naming directors to offices where people are getting laid off? I'm confused. Explain this to me like I'm a third grader. Then I hang up. That's in the same email, and I send it also every week.
If our professional organizations are not functioning to your liking, run for office. That's what I'm going to do. Until when you built something better or somebody built something better, motivate your early career people around you. Give them space to build something better if you're not going to do nothing or get out of the way, if you're in the way. What's not tolerable is sitting in a lie that we got some polarity going on. The country's not polarized. Congress is. We just buy into that because it's easy. It's easy to feel separated from everybody else because you don't know how.
"Okay, well, what's your professional organization do?" You could start there. You're a licensed person with a legal obligation. If you're not going to pay money to participate in your professional organization, professional society, if you're not going to be part of your labor union or whatever organizing tactics that you have at your workplace, if you're not going to participate in this, I want to at least get out of the way because you're continuing to perpetuate this notion that we're separated, which is not true.
In my mind, it's really more about-- and you have to activate, if you're going to do nothing else, if you're just going to come and get your shit, if you're a preceptor, if you are a clinical person training new grads, whatever it is, ask them what their ideas are, how to fit. Become a conduit for creativity. Come and get it. In my mind, you're a nurse, put your nurse fighting because we're going to figure this out. Don't let fear keep you from putting your craziest idea out in the world. Some people are connectors. Some people are conduits. You're not doers.
Okay, fine. Then light that up and put those of us who are activating our own gifts or get out of our way, if you are fearful, whatever it is. We have got to collect. If I had the magic wand to erase polarity, trust me, I would have used it all already. I only know a very important [unintelligible 00:45:05] without nothing. It is shared work for a reason, the magic don't get unleash unless we are all-- You've got to get the right [unintelligible 00:45:15] of nurses together to do some of the craziest work on the planet.
I will tell you, I work with Sharon when we started same time. I know David Holmes, I know Jeanette Ickovics, and all the people you probably looked at and evaluated, in that Stanley partnership. You know how crazy it was this day? [unintelligible 00:45:35] We need the craziest ideas that people have ever come with [unintelligible 00:45:42] about how to fix nursing, how to fix healthcare. We need them all right now, why not? We've already shown, or we've already been shown that the policy levers, that the procedural lever, they can be broken, and it's been chaotic and it's been painful, and it's been cruel.
How can we do this better? The template has already been broken, so why not do anything that is part of [unintelligible 00:46:09]? Why not? Why not create a coalition of academic medical center nurses who are going to team up with federally qualified health centers and do popups in the parking lot, why not? We need everybody's wildest ideas because we've already been stone, we knew what we had wasn't working, but we just can't ride along hoping, fixating, tweaking [unintelligible 00:46:36]. Well, now, we have an opportunity to remake, rebuild.
What was that whole $6 million man, remember all that? They had the whole better, stronger, faster. I'm old so I'm showing my thing, but like whatever that monologue was, we could do that. [unintelligible 00:46:55] an individual, it would be for a new structure. We've already seen that our physician colleagues are not going to be out of this, so I don't need to go down. That situation is a [unintelligible 00:47:04]. All this happened on me watching and no heat to our physician colleagues, but like the blanket, the template is off. Everything possible right now.
What are we going to do? Not what is Monica going to do, I'll tell you what I'm going to do, but what are we going do? The only way that you can get to that, and I wish it was Monica to do it with nursing and shared work for what we need and the collective brilliance of all of us to make a decision about what the future is going to look like.
Sarah: Thanks for spending your time with us during this episode of Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses. If you liked what you heard, it helps us both. If you subscribe, rate, leave a raving review and share this episode with a friend. If you want more from us, head to bundlebirthnurses.com or follow us on Instagram. Now, it's your turn to go and remember why you became a nurse and what it means to be a nurse. While you do that, begin to find practical ways to cultivate curiosity, which is the antidote to panic and fear in our world. We'll see you next time.