Creating a More Equitable Health Care System with Kumhee Ro, DNP, APRN, FAANP
February 24, 2024
Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced. - James Baldwin
Kumhee Ro gave a very interesting presentation covering a lot of ground in a short time. As a nursing professional she told us how 75% of our nursing staff are women. We learned about her Korean culture and her immigrant father as an example of how health systems need to provide comfort, familiarity, and sensitivity to our diverse communities to get the best outcomes.
Providing this kind of diversity spans all aspects of health care, including clinical and hospital settings, teaching, scholarship, and health policy advocacy. Our covid experience played havoc with the health care system. In studies, nurses indicate their number one desire is to have mutual respect and acceptance throughout the entire pipeline from recruitment to education to patient care.
As an example of how this pipeline can work, she shared a story about a Central Washington University student whose parents were addicted to drugs and provided no care or guidance. She finally got some support from a good foster home, received a scholarship to Seattle University, and is now a successful nurse practitioner.
She discussed the widening disparity between urban and rural healthcare. Many nurse training facilities are in urban areas, and graduates often stay near where they have been trained. However, they have found that providing training in less urban and even rural areas provides a significant statistical boost to more nurses staying in rural areas.
She earned a fellowship at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC. She spent a year there and was part of the first cohort that was all women and had a great picture of the six diverse women. She has extended her leave from Seattle University and is now on the advisory committee to the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality here in Washington State. Learn more about Kumhee Ro here.
We had a good crowd and several new visitors for this Zoom meeting. At the conclusion of the program, we heard from the two University of Washington students who we sponsored to attend AAUW’s National Conference for College Women Student Leaders (NCCWSL), a leadership conference for young women held at the University of Maryland in May 2023.
They are sisters, Karishama, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, and Heena, who is nearing graduation majoring in Informatics. We learned about their background, the sessions they attended, networking opportunities, and future plans. Both felt the leadership conference was very valuable.
Safiya Karmy-Jones from the University of Washington Women’s Center Making Connections also attended our Zoom meeting. Both Karishama and Heena worked through the Making Connections program, which provides classes, mentors, and technical assistance to young, diverse students starting in the eighth grade to prepare them for college. Like the other students in the program, the two sisters represent the first generation of their family to attend a college or university.