We're back for season 5 of The Handoff with a very special guest, Dr. Sheldon D. Fields. Dr. Fields is the inaugural Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion at Penn State University, where he is also a research professor in the College of Nursing. Dr. Fields was the first-ever male Registered Nurse selected for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellowship, in which he served as a policy adviser to Senator Barbara Mikulski on the Senate HELP committee during the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Dr. Fields is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and the National Academies of Practice.

After more than 30 years in the healthcare industry, Dr. Fields has said that it is his personal mission to do everything he can to help nursing move forward with a plan to diversify the profession. Today he and I talk about what that plan looks like, what nurse educators need to do to help combat racism in the field, how we can recruit more diverse students into nursing and how we can teach nurses and nursing students to be anti-racist.

Links to recommended reading:

• The Future of Nursing 2020-2030
• National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing

The full transcript for this episode can be found here: http://www.trustedhealth.com/the-handoff-podcast/sheldon-fields