Benita Cotton-Orr
What does a nurse need to know?
For most of us, the answer is obvious. Nurses, like doctors, should be well versed in the highest standards of medical care, the latest scientific research, and the best and most personalized treatments for each and every patient.
But Emory University has a different answer.
Emory, through its schools of Business, Nursing and Healthcare, is now indoctrinating nurses in identity politics. This fact is clear in its Chief Nursing Executive Program, which starts in late June. One of the program’s major focuses is so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” – the centerpiece of the woke agenda. DEI is inherently divisive. It even promotes racial discrimination. This is the last thing nurses should learn.
The Emory program will have a major impact on healthcare in Georgia and beyond. It’s designed to help nurses take leadership roles at hospitals and other medical facilities, so they can “expand their influence.” With its DEI component, Emory is training nurse leaders who will instill divisive and discriminatory ideology across medicine.
This isn’t about teaching a handful of nurses. It’s about reshaping healthcare as a whole.
The details make clear what’s really happening. To start, Emory is teaching nurses to “encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.” That sounds harmless in principle, but it is frightening in practice. DEI is routinely used to justify racial favoritism in the name of diversity, unequal treatment in the name of equity, and exclusion of different views in the name of inclusion.
It’s already clear where this road leads. At other medical schools and institutions that have embraced DEI, we’ve seen the deliberate lowering of standards to promote diversity. That’s a direct danger to patients: It threatens the quality of the medical profession. We’ve also seen medical schools enforce political litmus tests, only hiring people who toe an extreme woke line.
Most concerningly, we’ve seen programs that delay – if not deny – patients medical care because of their skin color. At one of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals, there are plans to push white patients to the back of line in favor of black and brown patients. As a black woman myself, I stand to benefit from this kind of policy. But I oppose it because it’s clearly discriminatory – and dangerous to people’s health.
These are the kinds of concerning practices that DEI inevitably promotes. The nurse leaders who graduate from Emory’s program will be much more likely to carry these practices to hospitals and providers across the state. They’re also increasingly likely to become political activists.
Look no further than the program’s emphasis on “social determinants of health.” This wonky phrase is a woke favorite precisely because it focuses on political activism more than medical care. “Social determinants” means things like homelessness, poverty, welfare programs, climate change, and other non-medical issues. These things matter deeply, but what can nurses do about them? Nothing, except advocate for policies that activists demand. This is part of advancing a far left agenda under the guise of caring for patients.
Sadly, Emory’s Chief Nursing Executive Program is far from unique. Woke indoctrination has seeped into virtually all of medical education, including both medical and nursing schools. Tomorrow’s medical professionals are being taught that America is racist and that medicine must play a role in transforming society along radical lines.
Patients and policymakers need to fight this dangerous trend, before the medical profession is completely corrupted. What’s happening at Emory won’t stay there. It will profoundly shape the care that you and I receive, surely for the worse. We must move healthcare in a better direction, starting with medical education, so that each and every American gets the best care possible.
Benita Cotton-Orr, a resident of Sky Valley, Ga., is a senior fellow at Do No Harm.
