In Praise of Nurses
by Laura Lambert
Elizabeth Talmont is a nurse practitioner and co-director of clinical services for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. plannedparenthood.org spoke to her about the importance of nurses, both to Planned Parenthood and to the reproductive health movement at large.
How long have you been a nurse?
For 10 years. It’s a second career — I was a community organizer for Planned Parenthood before that. From 1989 to about 1994 I was a public affairs administrative person par excellence. But while I was doing organizing, I decided to become a nurse. I went back to school at night, first to become a registered nurse (RN) and then a nurse practitioner (NP) in 2002. I graduated two months after my first daughter was born. When you’re a late bloomer, you do anything it takes.
My specialty is as an adult NP, which I chose because it would allow me to treat both women and men. But most of my experience in reproductive health is as a non-nurse. I managed a clinic where abortions were provided in Jersey City, NJ, when I was going to nursing school.
What attracted you to nursing?
I had a Hallmark moment when I accompanied Dr. Allan Rosenfield [dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, professor of obstetrics and gynecology, a strong advocate for reproductive health and justice, and a winner of the PPFA Margaret Sanger Award] to Minnesota, where he testified about why mandatory parental involvement laws are bad for teens’ health. This was in the early ‘90s. He spoke about the time before abortion was legal, about seeing women die from sepsis caused by botched abortion. (You only have to smell sepsis once to know what it is, because it’s so awful.) I thought, that’s where I need to be — I need to be in the trenches, I need to be there, providing hands-on care. And even though I don’t provide hands-on care now, I bring that perspective with me in my current role.
Why are nurses so important to the reproductive health movement, in particular?
I don’t think any other element of the health care profession understands the dynamic between people’s reality and medicine as well as nurses do. We all know that physicians play an important and critical role. But I believe nurses are best at being able to really talk to patients, and bridge the gap between patients and medicine.
Say, for instance, you have a person who is 18 and seems reasonable and prudent and has a good head on her shoulders. She seems like a good candidate for the pill, so you prescribe it to her. But then she comes back, pregnant. One response is to say, “Oh, that’s the failure rate with the pill.” A nurse is trained to go a step further and ask questions or say, “So, you must have a lot going on that makes it hard to take a pill on time. I get that your life is crazy right now. Maybe you need something else, like an IUD.” A nurse often has time to speak about the personal realities of a situation. We are able to deal with the psychosocial issues and evaluate them as being as important as anything else — especially when talking about intimate things. Our role is to be that person’s advocate. That’s part of our training, too. It’s a nice marriage.
What roles do nurses play at Planned Parenthood?
Frankly, I think they are the unsung heroes of this organization.
The bulk of the exams that are done at Planned Parenthood are done by nurses. When we say we serve three million patients a year, I would say that 98 percent of those patients are treated by nurses — though I don’t have the numbers to back that up. (Editor’s Note: For every physician working at a Planned Parenthood health center, there are more than 10 nurses.) In many ways, nurses run this organization, like they do other health care organizations. You know, in the middle of the night at the hospital, patients aren’t yelling, “Doctor! Doctor!” They’re yelling, “Nurse!”
To that end, Planned Parenthood has been a leader in championing nursing education. Nurse practitioners have been around since the 1970s — even before that, in certain specialties. Planned Parenthood has been an avenue for people to get their training and education. Up until this past year, Planned Parenthood had our own NP training program, which is now part of Drexel University. And still, many Planned Parenthood affiliates are training sites for local universities. A student training to be a women’s health NP can go to a Planned Parenthood health center, set up shop, and get the coaching and mentoring from someone in that affiliate. The rise of the women’s health NP has been, I think, an underappreciated and under-recognized contribution of Planned Parenthood.
Any final thoughts?
I am really proud to be a nurse. Margaret Sanger [the founder of Planned Parenthood] was a nurse. She saw the public health needs in her community — women were dying needlessly from unsafe abortions, kids were not being cared for, women needed to control their fertility — and she did something about it.
Today, nurses must rally themselves to address similar kinds of public health concerns. Nurses are well-situated for the day-to-day care of individual people, but we also need to be looking at the bigger picture and using our profession to work on behalf of all women and families.
Laura Lambert is a writer/editor for plannedparenthood.org.
Published: 05.07.07 | Updated: 08.29.07
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