7 minute read
A life’s mission to promote mental health in immigrant families and youth
DNP student Blessing Azonwu earns prestigious Jonas Scholar honor
by Susan Maas
Working as a float nurse at Regions Hospital in St. Paul a decade ago, Blessing Azonwu had a revelation.
She’d wanted to work in health care since her childhood in Nigeria, when she was frequently ill with typhoid fever. But during Azonwu’s first shift in a mental health unit, a light bulb went off as she remembered a long-suffering aunt who’d died years earlier. “It took me back to my auntie,” Azonwu says. “And I began to reflect back and realize, oh, this is what was going on! She would take off, and sometimes we wouldn’t know where she was, and then she would come back and seem very, very paranoid. All these major symptoms were present,” Azonwu recalls. “And then, when I was working in that mental health unit, everything connected ... I’m like, ‘oh my God, this a treatable illness.’” Her career path crystallized then and there. Azonwu, who came to the U.S. in her late 20s, had been accepted to medical school in Nigeria. Her family couldn’t afford the tuition, consequently she completed a less-costly communications degree. After arriving in the states, she began working in home care — work that affirmed her original attraction to health care. Azonwu’s husband urged her to consider returning to school. “He would watch the baby [their second] and drop me off at class,” she says. Azonwu earned a nursing diploma at
continued from page 27
Minneapolis Community and Technical College, then tested her way to be an LPN. On her way to completing her bachelor’s degree at Metro State University, the family welcomed their third child.
A GIFT FOR CONNECTION
Azonwu — who’d always loved learning so much that in childhood, her mother would warn her “you won’t go to school in the morning if you don’t do your chores” — came to class five days after giving birth via C-section. She didn’t know her professor would happily accommodate her recovery period. “I just really wanted to graduate that year,” Azonwu laughs. In 2011, she began working at Regions part time, while continuing her nursing home position. There, Azonwu’s passion for mental health was ignited. She believes her first name — Ngozi in Nigerian, which means blessing — drew some patients to her. “It seemed therapeutic to a lot of patients. They say, ‘Can you sit down and talk to me?’ Sometimes that’s what people need, to have somebody sit and listen.” In 2018, Azonwu, now a mom of four, was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. After her successful surgery, she concluded that her educational journey wasn’t finished. “I’ve always admired the University of Minnesota because of their tremendous research work,” she says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, let me try my luck. Maybe I can get my doctorate in nursing in psychiatric mental health at the U of M.’” Azonwu applied to the psych-mental health DNP and was awarded a prestigious Jonas Scholarship; she’s now in the second year of the four-year, parttime program.
CARING FOR THE WHOLE PERSON
She also began developing mental health education programming at her church, a parish of mainly West African immigrants, after noticing that the subject seemed off limits to some members of older generations. “In some immigrant communities, people are just beginning to understand that this is not something that happens to somebody as a result of their own fault,” Azonwu says. Moreover, she adds, many immigrant parents are working so hard for their families’ survival that they’re at a loss about how to respond to their kids’ struggles. “When you come here, it’s like you’re starting life afresh,” Azonwu says. “The parents are busy working, trying to pay the bills, trying to put food on the table and provide shelter, and maybe you don’t have that time to sit down and understand that these kids are going through” trauma, depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues.
This, Azonwu has realized, is her life’s mission: to help promote mental health, with a special focus on immigrant families and youth. Her dream — “if I can find the resources” — is to someday open her own clinic with a whole-person emphasis. “If you’re not mentally stable, the rest of your body is not stable either. And you can only take care of your whole body when you are in a sound state of mental health,” Azonwu says. “When one system goes wrong, it affects all other systems. It’s all interconnected.
“We have to shift from just focusing on one part of the body and move to looking at the whole body as one.”
Blessing Azonwu listens to a parishioner at Restoration Chapel, where Azonwu is developing mental health education programming.
Photo: Darin Kamnetz
DRIVEN BY DATA
Knoo Lee, PhD ’21, uses nursing informatics to aid vulnerable populations
As a young nurse in South Korea, Knoo Lee, PhD ’21, saw glimpses of the influence technology could wield on nursing, particularly by harnessing the power of data analytics.
To fully satisfy his curiosity, he decided he needed to travel half a world away to build a foundational knowledge in the area of nursing informatics at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing. Thanks to that move, Lee is now applying big data analytics to better inform patient care in vulnerable populations such as children and older adults. After earning his PhD, he’s advancing his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri. “Nowadays, the usage of technologies or analytics such as machine learning are very ubiquitous,” says Lee. “But what I really relish is that in the field of nursing, there is still room for improvement. And I strongly believe that I can be a part of that so that I can help people who are in need.”
Lee studied mechanical engineering before pivoting to nursing following his mandatory military service in the South Korean Navy. While working in the gastroenterology unit of a hospital in Seoul, though, he found himself restless to apply skills from his engineering background. A move back to his hometown of Busan, a port city, gave him the chance to work in telemedicine for crew members on commercial ships while also dipping his toes into data as a clinical research nurse.
“When you work in the private sector, you definitely learn a thing or two, but in terms of what’s really out there, the knowledge itself, in my own opinion, starts from academia,” he says. “So I wanted to see what’s really happening in terms of informatics.” His search led him to the School of Nursing, which offers the second-ranked nursing informatics program in the United States, according to the U.S. News and World Report graduate school rankings. When Lee arrived, he says he found a supportive, inclusive environment that allowed him the time to get acclimated to a new place—he discovered a new appreciation for sunlight in the fall and winter and enjoyed the balance of natural beauty and culture in the Twin Cities—and provided the resources to explore his interest in informatics.
The School of Nursing houses the Center for Nursing Informatics, connecting emerging research to patient care, and collaborates in interdisciplinary efforts with the Institute for Health Informatics, which brings together faculty and students from across the University of Minnesota.
Lee leveraged those resources while working on his dissertation under the direction of Professor Connie White Delaney, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, FNAP, dean of the School of Nursing and co-director of the Center for Nursing Informatics. Lee collaborated with multiple organizations including the National Association of School Nurses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Minnesota Department of Education to collect data and apply machine learning techniques to examine the causes behind chronic absenteeism in schoolchildren. That’s the type of relevant research the School of Nursing strives to produce. “When I first got here, my sole focus and interest was sitting in the methodologies,” says Lee. “I was fortunate enough to work with people who actually work in the real world, and that really helped me a lot to proceed with my research. I’ve done some focus group interviews with school nurses, and that helped me attach what I’m doing with the real world.” He says his PhD program has allowed him to fuse his nursing background with his interest in datadriven research. And he’s eager to use that powerful combination to help those in need. “We need a person who brings a perspective of nursing, who knows how to interpret the results, and have the interpretation in the perspective of nursing,” he says, “so that when we are seeing the data, we know how to use this data to improve patient care.”
– Knoo Lee, a recent PhD grad
IN HIS OWN WORDS
Hear more about how Knoo Lee is using his PhD degree to improve patient care by watching a video at z.umn.edu/KnooPhD.
