Debra Toney, Ph.D., R.N., laughs during her Martin Luther King Jr. Day Address Monday in Light Hall. (photo by Susan Urmy)
Lecture, award honor legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
At the start of her Martin Luther King Jr. Day Address, Debra Toney, Ph.D., R.N., poked a little fun at the audience in 208 Light Hall after a show of hands revealed nursing and medical students were sitting in clustered groups well apart from one another.
Toney said one of her main goals is “getting doctors and nurses to get along with one another.”
Toney, the immediate past president of the National Black Nurses Association, a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow, and the president and founder of TLC Health Care Services, a large home health care company in Las Vegas, spoke on Monday, Jan. 16.
She said students should consider what their dreams are now and ask themselves if they are working together to make that dream become a reality.
She quoted King, who said the greatest injustice is lack of access to equitable health care.
“But some of those same injustices continue to plague us today, in access to care, quality of coverage, disease rates and outcomes.
“We work and go to school together today without the segregation of the 1960s, yet we often go home to segregated neighborhoods and communities,” Toney said.
Toney told the audience that they would need to work toward reducing disparities and injustice in health care by becoming advocates and speaking with policymakers, but that success would also depend on health care professionals working together to achieve these goals.
Her talk, entitled “Improving the Health of Our Nation: How We Care Matters,” also focused the challenges facing those entering the health care industry in finding balance between the art and the science of caring.
Michael DeBaun, M.D., MPH, center, received this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Award from George C. Hill, Ph.D., and Jana Lauderdale, Ph.D., R.N. (photo by Susan Urmy)
As part of the presentation, Michael DeBaun, M.D., MPH, J.C. Peterson Chair in Pediatric Pulmonology, professor of Pediatrics, and director of the Vanderbilt-Meharry Center for Excellence in Sickle Cell Disease, was presented with the Martin Luther King Jr. Award.
Each year the award is presented to a Vanderbilt faculty or staff member in the School of Medicine, School of Nursing or the Medical Center who emulates King’s principles through his or her work.
DeBaun was recognized both for his leadership as a teacher and mentor in Pediatrics as well as for his world-renowned work in the field of hematology-oncology to fight sickle cell disease.
The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture is presented by Vanderbilt University’s School of Nursing and School of Medicine in conjunction with the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Series.