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Vanessa Shields-Haas has high hopes for the future of nursing. Vanessa believes nurses, as one of the largest groups of professionals in the country, have a powerful, but as yet untapped, voice. Inspired by John Lewis, Vanessa vows to get into good and necessary trouble for as long as she’s able. She is a Family Nurse Practitioner, providing comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare as well as gender affirming care for the LGBTQ community. She is also a certified forensic nurse, providing trauma-informed care to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. She shares her life with her wife, daughter, and various rescue animals. Fun to her looks like gardening, hunting, fly fishing, and making her daughter laugh.
Vanessa, Laura, and Jeanne Leigh
You can follow Jess Dillard-Wright on Twitter @radicalnurses or on Facebook. Or email her at jdillardwright@gmail.com. When she is not fomenting revolution, you’ll find Jess hanging out with her three kids and partner (aren’t they adorable?). Together, they like to go to the beach, play silly games
(Bears vs. Babies, anyone?), read books, and try to bake amazing things. Other times, you’ll find Jess hard at work, raising up the next generation of nurses as a nurse academic. She is working on her Ph.D., which is a historical account of feminism and nursing, a history of the present looking at the tensions inherent in professional nursing and political activism, focused on Cassandra Radical Feminist Nurses Network.
Jess believes that nursing is the future of healthcare. And that healthcare extends far beyond the confines of the acute care setting. The largest constituent of the healthcare system, nurses collectively have a powerful voice and untapped potential for action. Because – to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. – inequality in healthcare is the gravest injustice of all, Jess is committed to dismantling white cis heteropatriarchy in healthcare (and beyond) through critical engagement and ongoing activism. It goes without saying that Jess’s outspoken opinions are her own.
Radical Nurses 