March 2024

As we embrace Women’s History Month, DUSON is proud to highlight the School's Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner (WHNP) program, which prepares advanced practice nurses with the skills and expertise necessary to provide primary and specialty medical care for women.

“Women represent over 50% of our population, and deserve attention to their gender specific care,” said Kathryn Trotter, DNP, CNM, FNP-C, CHSE, FAANP, FAAN, lead faculty. “Clinically, women’s health nurse practitioners can provide primary and specialty care to women from age 13 to maturity, and this program came to be to begin to fulfill a void in N.C. and nationally.”

Students can earn a master’s degree in nursing or a post-master’s certificate for students interested in specializing in women’s health. The program accepted its first cohort of students in January 2015 and all seven graduates were women. Since then there have been 123 MSN and 13 post-master’s certificate graduates from the WHNP program.

With advanced degrees in business and nursing, Maurice Brownlee, MSN’16, DBA, MBA, RN, CPHRM, FASHRM, CHC, blended his professional education to found Wellness Homes of Chicago in 2018, an initiative created to close the health disparity gap in Chicago by offering a different kind of care model. The wellness homes intentionally look more like actual homes than health care clinics, Brownlee said, and the word client is preferred over patient.

“I don’t have clinic chairs, I don’t have the traditional waiting rooms,” said Brownlee, who serves as the medical director and chief wellness officer. “My exam rooms are not traditional. It is, in fact, a home.”

The goal of Brownlee’s model is to provide inclusive care and health education for people who might otherwise fall through the cracks of traditional health care services. 

The New England Journal of Medicine has published a study by DUSON professors Schenita Randolph, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, and Ragan Johnson, DNP, MSN, APRN-BC, examining the feasibility of integrating salon stylists, edutainment videos, and PrEP navigators to help educate Black women on the benefits of PrEP (preexposure prophylaxis) in preventing HIV infections.

The idea of a formal training for stylists as conduits for HIV/AIDS prevention education came from the stylists themselves. “In fact, providing continuing education units from the state board of cosmetology for the training was the idea of two beauty salon stylists who served as consultants on this project,” says Randolph. 

DUSON ABSN students recently participated in a poverty simulation led by facilitators from the Missouri Community Action Network. The simulation placed about 80 students in simulated households facing a diverse range of challenges experienced by those living in various levels of poverty. School faculty and staff volunteered as service providers, educators, nonprofits, and business owners within the simulated town of "Realville" and interacted with the households as they worked to navigate assigned roles and situations.

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