Spectrum

In just over a decade, America will face a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors and 200,000 nurses will need to be hired each year, according to the American Hospital Association.

Overall, there will be a 3.2 million shortage of healthcare workers by 2026, according to a white paper presented by https://www.mercer.com/.

Some of this is attributable to “COVID burnout” by healthcare workers but we also are facing a crisis of both our population getting older and healthcare workers quitting the profession, says Dr. Kenneth Johnson.

Dr. Johnson is the Dean of the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and chief medical officer at Ohio University. Dr. Johnson also serves as chair of the Ohio Council of Medical School Deans.

Dr. Johnson says we have known about this looming crisis for years but as a country, we have failed to adequately address it.

COVID also has exacerbated this situation. Some 30 percent of healthcare workers are considering leaving the profession and almost 60 percent have reported impacts to their mental health because of work during the pandemic, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Survey

One reason for a shortage of doctors is that most doctors’ residencies in hospitals are funded by Medicare and about 25 years ago, Congress capped the number of residencies as a cost-cutting measure. Congress has failed to agree to remove the cap.

Dr. Johnson also says that there is a paucity of faculty members to teach new medical personnel, especially in nursing fields. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing says that 80,000 qualified nursing applicants were turned away in 2019 due to lack of qualified faculty, clinical sites, classroom space and other budget constraints.

Dr. Johnson explains to Spectrum host Tom Hodson what needs to be done to quell this crisis.

Author, career counselor, podcast host and executive coach Beverly Jones explains to WOUB’s Spectrum Podcast how we can chase away the “Winter Blues” and shake ourselves out of those “February Doldrums” at work.

She gives us tips on how we can improve of emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing during these dull days of isolation from weather and the COVID pandemic.

She outlines concrete steps for us to improve your purpose, your people skills, and your performance.

Jones is a strong proponent of us “checking-in” with our state of wellbeing and making appropriate adjustments. Those adjustments may be becoming more physically active or learning something new to stimulate your brain.

She also stresses that we need to create a list of positive people in our lives and start reaching out to them. Personal contact through emails, texts, letters, or digital chat is important to stay connected and to combat our sense of isolation.

Jones’ most recent book is “Find Your Happy at Work: 50 Ways to get unstuck, move passed boredom and discover fulfillment.”

She also is host of the popular WOUB podcast, Jazzed About Work, where she tackles, along with her guests, major issues involving careers and jobs.

Dr. Janice Marie Collins is an author, journalist, documentarian, educator, and humanitarian.

Her most recent book is Teaching Without Borders: Creating Equity, and Inclusion with Active Centralized Empowerment (ACE).

She also authored, 250 Years and Still a Slave.

Dr. Collins says that people, and especially students, can feel marginalized, trapped, and enslaved through lack of diversity, inclusion, and empowerment.

She is a strong advocate for giving students power and opportunities in the classroom and providing students a fair chance to maximize their talents and potentials without demonizing them.

In this episode, Dr. Collins gives numerous examples of how ACE works and succeeds.

In addition to her education advocacy, she has won a journalism award for her student-based website: hearmyvoiceonline.com. It gives an outlet to many and varied student perspectives.

Dr. Collins is currently president of World Changers Media International Foundation. (WCMIF).

“WCMIF is a non-profit foundation that is in the transformational business of creating, discovering and promoting platforms, stories and voices to help change the world into a kinder, gentler, more educated, inclusive and empowering one,” says Dr. Collins.

She can be contacted on Instagram at @drjaic, on Facebook at “Active Centralized Empowerment with Dr. Janice Marie Collins,” on Twitter @janicemcollins and on LinkeIn at “Janice Marie Collins, Ph.D.”

Author, food journalist, content creator and social media celebrity Katie Quinn just finished her first personal book tour in the United States to promote her book “Cheese, Wine, and Bread: Discovering The Magic of Fermentation in England, Italy, and France.”

She recently spent time in Manhattan and made some personal appearances in the Midwest before heading back to her current home in Italy. This was her first time to promote her book in person in America since it was published by Harper Collins/William Morrow in April of 2021.

Her book, which was three years in the making, has garnered outstanding reviews from a wide variety of publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Real Simple Magazine. It is touted as one of the top cookbooks of 2021.

The book is a combination of personal stories, observations, personality profiles, scientific facts, and recipes. It is a narrative cookbook with stunning photography and illustrations that leap off the pages.

While visiting Ohio, Katie stopped by the WOUB studios to give our Spectrum Podcast a taste of her book, update us on its success, and share with us some holiday recipes that might be fun for the whole family to make.

We talk about her career, her writing, the success of her “QKatie” YouTube channel and her passion for both storytelling and food.

She also discusses some of the difficulties in trying to promote a book through American media while residing in Italy. She shares some of her humorous and fretful moments of being on live television from her small kitchen in Europe.

Earl Johnson trained as a pastor at Yale’s Divinity School, worked for anthropologist Margaret Mead in African and observed firsthand violence in London and in Jerusalem.

He then returned to a church in Columbia, Missouri but was restless. He then made major life decisions. He took a sabbatical from his church, came out as a gay man, and moved to New York City.

While in New York, he was discovered by agents, and he became a world-renowned model for high-end men’s clothing designers in Europe and the United States. He toured the globe.

However, he felt that he wanted to do more, so he gave up modeling and trained as a hospital chaplain. In the mid- 1990’s, he worked at New York’s Cabrini Medical Center and gave comfort to dying AIDS patients, their partners, and families.

In 2001, he moved to Washington D.C. to become a hospital chaplain and on his second day of work, he was inundated with victims and families from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Johnson had so much experience comforting the hurt and bereaved that he was recruited by the American Red Cross to create its crisis response teams. He managed those teams for a decade through some our nation’s greatest tragedies.

Now, Johnson has put his decades of experience into a new book, “Finding Comfort During Hard Times: A Guide to Healing after Disease, Violence and Other Community Traumas.” The book helps readers discover ways to find comfort even through the most trying of life’s circumstances.

Johnson talks with WOUB’s Spectrum Podcast about his life, his career, and the book in this new episode. His advice is perfect for those who may be suffering during this Holiday period.

Joe Nuxhall was a famous pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds. He also was a highly popular broadcaster for the club for over four decades.

Radio fans loved him for his colorful stories about his career and the game he loved.

He was the youngest pitcher ever to pitch in a major league game at age 15, toiled in the minors, and then became a stalwart part of the Reds’ pitching staff.

Later, he remained batting practice pitcher while holding his place in the broadcast booth.

All the time he was collecting stories of baseball, life, and broadcasting.

Those stories have been compiled and shared in a new book, “Joe Nuxhall: The Old Lefthander & Me”, written by author, journalist, and long-time media critic John Kiesewetter.

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to like the book, according to Kiesewetter.

Many of the stories share conversations about life in general and being a sports broadcaster.

Nuxhall was beloved by his teammates, his broadcast colleagues, and Reds’ fans.

He also was beloved by his hometown Hamilton, Ohio where he resided until his death in 2007.

Listen as Kiesewetter shares some of the stories with us and talks about his book.

Former President Donald Trump’s power over the GOP is not waning, instead it is growing stronger.

Trump’s influence surges as Democrats and President Joseph Biden tries to find ways to push their agenda through a gridlocked Congress, according to Philip Elliott, Washington correspondent for TIME and author of TIME’s weekday newsletter “The D.C. Brief”.

Elliott tries to unravel some of the current Congressional complexities and make them understandable.

He also charts what we might expect before the end of the year as the government struggles with legislation to increase its debt ceiling.

Elliott paints a rather dire picture for Democrats approaching the mid-term elections in 2022 and gives us insight on the Georgia gubernatorial Republican primary and the monumental general election upcoming.

He describes the disconnect that often appears between average Americans, working to support families, and the machinations of politicians of both parties in Washington.

Elliott predicts, however, that Democrats will be rolling out major messaging events in 2022 to try to convince people of the advantages they will receive from Biden’s Build Back America efforts across the country.

As a veteran Washington correspondent, Elliott gives us clear, non-partisan analysis from a seasoned perspective.

Judge Gayle Williams Byers, a black female judge in Northeastern Ohio, and Tom Hodson, Spectrum host and legal analyst, break down the impact of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittals on the judicial system, on the black community and on the future of peaceful protest.

While both respect the sanctity of the jury’s verdicts, they highlight advantages in the trial process that were given to Rittenhouse. They discuss the judge’s behavior and some of his rulings along with the inherent racism and white privilege that permeate our judicial process across the country.

Judge Byers states that if Rittenhouse had been black that the verdicts would probably be much different, and he would have been convicted instead of released.

She recounts the fear that these verdicts have caused black parents who worry about their children and their relationships with both police and militia-type people armed with high powered weapons.

Hodson expresses concerns that the verdicts will weaponize people who are anti-peaceful protests and put future protestors at risk for violent retribution.

Both claim that the verdicts and the weaponization of anti-protestors will result in a “chilling effect” on free speech and the constitutional right to peacefully protest.

Judge Byers and Hodson both express fear that Rittenhouse will become the new “poster boy” for the alt-right and militaristic fascist groups in the country and that violence will increase, as a result.

While many of us have been mired in malaise about our careers during the COVID-19 pandemic, executive coach, career consultant and author Beverly Jones tells us how we can “Find our Happy at Work” in a new book that helps us get unstuck, move past boredom, and discover fulfillment.

Jones, in short pithy chapters, lays out 50 ways to turn your tedium into active steps to take control of your emotions and actions and to make work much more enjoyable and less dreary.

She says if you hate your job and want a change, that the starting point is with you and motivating yourself to transcend past bad habits and create good new ones.

She is a strong proponent of self-care and mindfulness to help alter one’s attitudes in positive ways.

In her book, Jones suggests concrete ways to improve your work habits to give you more joy and job satisfaction

She also prompts people to not stay isolated and gives tips on how one can continue networking even during periods of physical seclusion.

This is Jones’ second book. Her first was “Think Like and Entrepreneur and Act Like a CEO.”

Jones also is the host and producer of a highly popular podcast “Jazzed About Work.” It is available through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or at NPR One. It also is available through the NPR Podcast Directory: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/524588388/jazzed-about-work

Carolyn Bailey Lewis is a woman who has been determined to always push herself and to set new standards throughout her career. She has been a pioneer in her field, but it hasn’t been easy.

While forging her path, as a black woman, Carolyn has had to fight battles against racism, bigotry, and prejudice as well as sexism.

Coming from the small town of Bluefield, West Virginia where she attended segregated schools and lived in a segregated neighborhood, Carolyn became the only black woman in her class of journalism students at West Virginia University.

Being able to adapt to a “white world” and function as the only person of color took great strength, will, and dexterity.

In 1971, Carolyn became the first black woman to graduate from the Perley I Reed School of Journalism, now the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University.

She continued her trailblazing in 1993 when she became the first African American woman named to manage a full-service public television station in the continental United States at WNPB-TV in Morgantown.

In 1997, she became the Director and General Manager of WOUB Public Media at Ohio University, where she stayed until her retirement.

That same year she also became an ordained minister.

During her 14 years at WOUB, Carolyn rose nationally in the ranks of public broadcasting. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), a member of the Board of Directors of the National Education Telecommunications Association (NETA) and Chair of the PBS Advertising and Promotion Advisory Committee.

But she wasn’t finished. Against all odds and while confined to a wheelchair, she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communications Studies – 36 years after her undergraduate degree from WVU.

Most recently, she received the 2020 Medal of Merit for Professional Achievement from Ohio University.

Currently, in her retirement Carolyn has authored a book, is the co-founder and chairman of the Dr. Carolyn Foster Bailey Lewis Family Foundation and is the co-founder and CEO of LifeDay Greeting Cards, Inc.

Her LifeDay cards celebrate surviving a major life-altering event or monumental moment in life.