'Radical' Transformation Innovation chair Jim McMahon views nursing as uniquely positioned to lead a disruptive revolution in health care The following is an excerpt of Jim McMahon’s speech delivered Oct. 15 at his installation as Chair for Innovation in Health Care.
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“ Should we, as a nation, be doing more to prevent people from getting sick in the first place, rather than waiting until they get sick to treat them?”
22 NURSING 2019 Volume 1
’d like to thank Dean [Kathy] Rideout for supporting me as the inaugural Chair for Innovation in Health Care. It’s such a great honor. And I’d especially like to thank Marilyn Fiske for her generous donation that made the chair possible. The endowment has had a huge impact on how I am able to conduct my research, and especially the ability to devote more time to mentor junior investigators in the school. In thinking about delivering this speech tonight, and what I would say about innovation in health care, I thought, why stop at innovation? Why not go bold, why not talk about something even more radical than innovation – the health care equivalent to a Mars landing or reversing global warming? As some of you know, I earned my doctorate in biological and medical anthropology from the City University of New York, where I completed my dissertation and began working in the field of bone biology. Then a somewhat fortuitous event changed the course of my career. In order to make ends meet, I took a job as a data analyst for a study investigating the spread of HIV among women in East Harlem. I spent time working in affected communities doing community outreach and interviews, and I began to see firsthand how forces like discrimination, violence, and poverty restricted and shaped people’s choices and behaviors leading to increased exposure to HIV and other diseases. I found this work so eye-opening, so compelling, that I decided to switch my area of research to HIV prevention and epidemiology. Like HIV/AIDS, the diseases that account for the vast majority of premature morbidity and mortality in the U.S. – such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and even some cancers – are preventable through behavioral, social and environmental changes, such as improved diet and nutrition, adequate exercise, high quality sleep, social integration, safe sex and healthy relationships, and reduced exposure to addictive or toxic substances. But we also know that these factors are shaped by more distal structural factors like discrimination, violence, and poverty. Given this evidence, the “radical” question is: Should we, as a nation, be doing more to prevent people from getting sick in the first place, rather than waiting until they get sick to treat them? This is not an
