Director of Diversity and Inclusivity Improves Health Disparities Through Nursing Research

This article appeared on UKNow on June 2, 2016.

College of Nursing Associate Professor and Director of Diversity and Inclusivity Jenna Hatcher, RN, PhD, MPH, is taking preventive health care into the emergency department, “because for many Kentuckians that’s where they find their medical home,” she said.

“So if I go to a doctor, and the doctor says, ‘You should get a mammogram,’ I get a mammogram. If I don’t go and they don’t say it, I might wait years to get that mammogram,” Hatcher said. “So we’re hoping to catch the people who have fallen through the safety net of primary care.”

Hatcher, an associate professor in the UK College of Nursing, leads a five-year, National Cancer Institute-funded project called Sisters Educated in Emergency Departments (SEED). In this intervention, lay health providers go into emergency departments and “sit down with African American women and talk about mammograms and talk through the barriers that they had obtaining mammograms.”

Hatcher was also a co-investigator on Faith Moves Mountains, a breast and cervical cancer prevention project in Eastern Kentucky funded by the National Institutes of Health. 

She is the College of Nursing’s director of diversity and inclusivity, president of the local National Black Nurses Association chapter and the director of the Disparities Researchers Equalizing Access for Minorities (DREAM) Center. 

In this podcast, Hatcher shared her passion for community outreach and why she’s dedicated her career to improving health disparities in Kentucky.