Dolly Parton has died at 80, and the tributes have poured in from every corner of American life — country music, film, business, Appalachia. We wanted to write a different kind of tribute. As nurse scientists, Jamie and Melissa Anne dig into not just what made Dolly's philanthropy extraordinary, but why it worked.

From the 1988 Dollywood Foundation's Buddy Program (which cut participating-class dropout rates from 35% to 6%) to the Imagination Library's monthly books for children from birth to age five, to the Dolly Parton Birthing Unit that helped close a maternity care desert in rural Appalachia, to the $1 million that seeded the research behind the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine — we walk through the return on investment and the evidence base behind each one.

Dolly said she had no strategy and just gave from the heart. The research suggests she was doing upstream public health the whole time.

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The views and opinions expressed on Nursing the Nation are our own and do not represent those of our employers, academic institutions, or any organization we're affiliated with.

Cyclospora. Salmonella. Listeria. E. coli. It has felt like a relentless summer of foodborne illness headlines. So Jamie and Melissa Anne went looking for the actual data.

In this episode, we trace how an outbreak is actually discovered. We break down which federal agency picks up which food (USDA for meat, FDA for produce and packaged goods), and we hit the fact that shocked us: nearly all food recalls in this country are voluntary. USDA cannot order contaminated meat off the shelf. It can only ask.

We also examine what's happened to the response infrastructure. You won't be surprised by the reasons why.

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The views and opinions expressed on Nursing the Nation are our own and do not represent those of our employers, academic institutions, or any organization we're affiliated with.

Episode image made with CanvaAI.

This week, Dr. Victoria Soltis-Jarrett returns to Nursing the Nation to explain integrated behavioral health care — what it actually is, what it isn't, and why "we'll refer you two doors down" doesn't count. Dr. Soltis-Jarrett is the Carol Morde Ross Distinguished Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a newly inducted inaugural Fellow of the International Society of Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurses, with thirty-five years of clinical practice, education, and scholarship behind her.

Dr. Soltis-Jarrett walks us through TANDEM3-PC- the rural primary care integration model she built from the ground up after the off-the-shelf models didn't fit- and the Carolina Behavioral Health Integration Scholar traineeship, which has now educated more than two hundred nurse practitioners.

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The views and opinions expressed on Nursing the Nation are our own and do not represent those of our employers, academic institutions, or any organization we're affiliated with.