New Center Focuses on Healthcare History and Policy

“To administer effective health care, you have to be able to understand humans and their complexities,” says Smith, an associate professor at the School of Nursing. “Many health care problems we are trying to fix are caused by historical or policy issues, so you really can’t get the whole picture if you are not thinking about how it got to be this way.” 

To that end, Smith is leading an effort to launch a Center for Healthcare History and Policy in the School of Nursing — with the aim of solidifying the place of the humanities in health care education and research. 

The center will bring together Emory scholars and students from various disciplines who seek to understand the impact of history, legislation, and policy on health outcomes and the factors that affect health care delivery, especially to marginalized populations. Also, the center will create discussion forums, enhance collaborative grant application and publication initiatives, and host research events. Other activities will include working with faculty on curriculum, supporting student projects, establishing service-learning partnerships, and developing continuing education opportunities. 

Through its work, the center will espouse a historically informed, “bottom-up” view of health care where patients are the experts, and their life and health experiences are used to enhance approaches to care. 

“Nurses are agents of change and have been historically,” says Smith, the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities at Emory. “But if you don’t know that, and if you are not taught tools from the humanities — like sociology or history or even creative writing and the arts — then how are you going to connect with people and bring change to the world? That’s my big pitch for the humanities — understanding humanity.”