Ask an NP – Healthcare Inequity

00:00 So as a family nurse practitioner, one of the biggest ways I first saw inequality in health care, I was working in primary care in a fairly conservative community that really needed access to health care.

00:12 I had a patient who I came in.

00:15 I asked about their partner, and they ended up breaking down and crying because they didn't, they had never had someone to assume that their spouse was a man versus a woman.

00:26 And it ended up turning into this huge, we had a lot of good conversations just about safety, about different medications that they could maybe use that would make their, you know, just their life safer and their life overall better, which is I feel like my job as an FNP.

00:41 And that ended up blowing up into a whole community of people who just through the grapevine heard, that this could be a safe place to maybe go and have this conversation and get access to medications.

00:53 You couldn't get prep in this area.

00:55 People were driving over an hour to come and just get it and like because I was willing to prescribe it.

01:01 Things like STI screenings, people weren't doing them, if you weren't married in a lot of that area, it was just a very different - there was a gap in the population where if you didn't quite fit the mold of the person they were typically seeing, you had a lack of access to care.

01:19 So I think being just open-minded and providing care to everyone who really needs it, and being willing to learn.

01:27 You know, that wasn't - when I started providing prep, like I had to go and call like the Department of Health and all these other things because it was like I need help.

01:32 I was like, I want to make sure I'm doing this right.

01:34 Being willing to learn of how does fill in that gap that you find in care is huge.

01:41 And I promise you no matter where you live, there's some kind of gap in care that if you're willing to just ask people questions and become their trusted person and really just listen to them, you'll be able to find it and you can learn a lot about it.

01:52 And you can be that resource in that area that desperately needs it.