Women in Healthcare: Mary Naylor
In honor of last month’s Women’s History Month, Healthcare Finance News asked some of the women leaders in the nation’s healthcare industry to talk about the role of women in healthcare. Those conversations take us into April.
Today, we hear from Mary Naylor, PhD, RN, a gerontology professor and the director of the NewCourtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Naylor has an international reputation for her work as a geriatric scholar and a national reputation as a mentor to students. Her current research projects include work on the continuity of care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease, new care delivery models for older patients with multiple chronic conditions and health-related quality of life for elders in long-term care. Naylor is also the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a nationwide program researching and identifying the contributions of nurses to healthcare quality.
Q: What role do women have as decision-makers/leaders in today's healthcare sector?
A: Women are obviously, as evidence has shown, the major consumers – they are the major decision makers for their patients – in the case where women are the largest health professionals – but they’re also major advocates, and in a world in which I spend a lot of my time, a lot of it has to do with this notion that from moment of birth they’re caregivers. They’re caregivers as daughters to loved ones later in life. They’re caregivers as mothers to their children from the moment of birth. I think that they are the dominant resource that we have in our healthcare system to try to influence behaviors going forward.
Q: What do women bring to the table to shape the future of healthcare?
A: I think that that’s really an interesting question. I’m not sure that any of what I’m going to say is grounded in multiple randomized trials, but I do think that women bring perspective. Perspectives that often and particularly, again in the work that we do with vulnerable, chronically ill adults and their caregivers, they bring perspectives around what’s important to the people that are their loved ones. They tend to be more holistic in just focusing on a given problem at a given time. I also think that they are very much forward looking. We spend our world and time in this area of transition in health and healthcare. I certainly think that because women are the dominant caregiver (they bring) this sense of not just what’s it going to be like today but what is it going to be like in the future. How do we better position ourselves to anticipate needs and so on. This notion of anticipating the future in longer term not so much just what’s happening today, I think, has been really important – at least (in) our observations of this population (the elderly). I also think that they really care about what they know. Women are really anxious to know and have the skills and be positioned to do things for themselves around self-care or to be positioned to be able to help others when their care needs change. This receptivity to being able to empower themselves or empower others, as the language goes, I think is at least characteristic of the women that I’ve seen for over 20 or 30 years in our work. And maybe this is most monumental: I think women care about – and I’m not saying that men don’t – but women care about health in its most genuine form – about things that enable me to stay as healthy as I can even in the context of people living with multiple chronic conditions, so therefore they care about things that focus on health promotion and prevention. They certainly care about that in the context of children and loved ones. Sometimes women have not always taken care of themselves as they take on these multiple caregiver roles. I think they really, especially on behalf of their loved ones, want to be really out there advocating for health promotion and prevention.
Q: What do you personally believe should be the path forward to better care and lower costs?
A: I think the biggest – I think, well, among many, that we could really work on is changing the public’s expectations of what healthcare – health and healthcare – could be, should be. I think we have right now even very enlightened consumers who don’t exactly – especially when they’re in vulnerable times – have the expectations of a healthcare system that they should. By that I mean we should be raising expectations. Our work is on trying really (to) transform healthcare delivery so that it is based on what we know as the best kind of care we can deliver today, so certainly we should be really transforming healthcare based on knowledge, based on evidence. Everything else should flow from there. We should be aligning what we value and measure as quality; what we value and pay for in terms of reimbursement based on the current state of what we know is in the best interest of the people we serve. I think that that’s where we have our greatest potential and that means we’re going to have to figure out ways to make our consumers real partners in care and not just … as ‘patient centered’ but real partners. They must have access to the kind of actionable information that’s going to allow them to really capitalize on our care system and at the same time address their needs and preferences and values.
Follow HFN associate editor Stephanie Bouchard on Twitter @SBouchardHFN.
