Listen Again | 63: Affirming Care

In celebration of Pride Month, we’re returning to an earlier episode highlighting nurse practitioner and healthcare activist Dallas Ducar (she/her/hers), the CEO of Transhealth Northampton. People of all gender and sexual identities need and deserve respectful, affirming healthcare, and the work of Dallas and her team is essential in expanding access – and improving quality of life – for all.

While the recent pandemic caused devastating loss of life and strained health systems, it also brought into sharp focus nurses’ pivotal role in healthcare and their enormous, and largely untapped potential to shape patient care, rethink how healthcare is organized and where it’s delivered. In this fourth of a multi-episode series centered on the Accelerating Nursing, Transforming Healthcare report we take a close up look at how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed disparities in access to care that landed far more heavily on vulnerable communities. This is especially true for the Transgender community which has been uniquely affected by the pandemic in terms of access to gender-affirming care. We spend time with Nurse Practitioner and healthcare activist Dallas Ducar (she/her/hers), the CEO of Transhealth Northampton, and learn how their ground-breaking comprehensive care clinic delivers gender-affirming care to gender-diverse adults, children, and families. In this work, Dallas describes the ripple and compounding effects of discrimination, the impact of legislation on telehealth, the role of community-based participatory action research, and the ways that nurse-led innovation can be the playbook for healthier, experiences, outcomes, workplaces, and affirming care for all of us.

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