Social Determinants of Health
Black nurses have long known about and worked to address social determinants of health. Jessie Sleet Scales, likely the first Black public health nurse in New York City, worked to fight tuberculosis in the Black community in the early 1900’s. She wrote reports about how Black people's housing and employment conditions had a direct impact on their health.[2] Janice Phillips began working in the emergency room of the University of Chicago Hospital in the 1970’s and she noted that “even before we coined the term social determinants of health, I witnessed it right there firsthand in the [emergency department].” She saw patients who were experiencing homelessness or who lived in unsafe housing that made them sick. Eventually Phillips’ department began employing a social worker to work with patients coming into the emergency room, to help connect them with resources that might improve other factors in their lives that were contributing to their health problems.
Some Black nurses work in jobs that try to address these non-medical issues directly. Celestine Corrigan worked at the Cook County Department of Public Health from the 1990’s until her retirement in 2021 and much of her work involved supporting patients and families with both medical and non-medical issues. For example, in one role Corrigan visited the homes of children and their parents. During one visit, she found out that a family was about to lose their home because they could not afford house payments, so she connected the family to housing resources. She also supported many grandparents in the legal process of taking on guardianship of their grandchildren so that they could give medical consent for their grandchild when they needed care. Although these are not the core functions of nursing, nurses within and outside of hospitals often do whatever is needed to support a person’s, family’s and community’s ability to live a healthy life.
For many Black nurses, nursing is more than a career or a paycheck, it’s a part of the work they do within their community as well. Askale Facey-Philips, who graduated from nursing school during the COVID-19 pandemic, works as a full-time nurse while also operating a Jamaican grocery store in her town of Maywood, Illinois. Facey-Philips is a first-generation Jamaican American and so she and her husband started their business to give them and their community easy access to Jamaican and Caribbean products. Her community also lacks easy access to healthy, affordable foods with few high-quality grocery stores nearby. Her store provides both nourishment to her community’s bodies and soul through providing nutritional food and a taste of home for many Afro-Caribbean Chicagoans.
Sometimes Black nurses may encounter non-medical factors in a person’s health that they cannot address, but they still make an impact by establishing relationships of care and trust. Deborah Richmond-Bump describes how she sometimes treats Black women who are struggling with stress and depression because of the racial discrimination they face at their job. The women cannot quit the job and lose their income, and so Bump listens and provides emotional support to her patients while also helping them to manage their psychiatric medications and illnesses.
[1] “Social determinants of health,” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health.
[2] Marie O. Pitts Mosley, "Jessie Sleet Scales: First Black Public Health Nurse," The ABNF Journal, volume 5, no. 2 (March/April 1994).