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.

This week we're deviating from the norm, because as this episode airs, Melissa has defended her dissertation and is officially Dr. Melissa Anne DuBois.

To mark the occasion, Jamie went and got nerdy about where the PhD actually comes from — and it turns out the history is contested, medieval, and extremely useful the next time someone tells you nurses shouldn't use the title "doctor."

Nursing PhD enrollment has declined for the eleventh consecutive year, to 4,077 students in a workforce of 5.6 million. That's less than a tenth of a percent of all nurses in the US! We need more nurses with a PhD in nursing science, so contact us if you are a nurse considering this — we'd like to talk with you about it.

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An executive order from July 2025 calls street homelessness a psychiatric problem and prescribes involuntary commitment. In this episode, Jamie and Melissa break down EO 14321 Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets.

They discuss what the HUD data actually shows, how grant money becomes leverage, why defunding harm reduction and Housing First backfires, and what the June 2026 DOJ memo narrowing the interpretation of Olmstead v. L.C. means for community-based care.

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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.

The President calls TrumpRx "the most transformative healthcare initiative of all time." So what does it actually do? In this episode, Jamie and Melissa pull apart the branded drug-discount rollout — and find a website that links you to manufacturer coupons, not a pharmacy.

To understand why the same generic pill can cost $4 at one store and $19 at another, they follow the money through pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — the middlemen who now control roughly 80% of the market through rebate games, spread pricing, and the conflict of interest baked into companies that own the insurer, the PBM, and the pharmacy all at once.

They break down the structural fights that could actually change things (the bipartisan Break Up Big Medicine Act; Tennessee's Fair Rx Act and the CVS lawsuit that followed), why TrumpRx explicitly locks out Medicaid patients and won't count toward your deductible, and the now-infamous claim that prices were cut "600%" — a number that's mathematically impossible and rated Pants on Fire.

TLDR: A nurse's-eye view of what TrumpRx does for most Americans: basically nothing.

Have a TrumpRx story of your own? Email us or leave a note on Substack. Follow us at nursingthenation.substack.com.

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.

We close our four-part nursing analysis of the Make Our Children Healthy Again MAHA Strategy Report with its thinnest pillar on paper — and its most consequential in practice. Pillar 4 rests on one word every nurse knows intimately: voluntary.

Jamie and Melissa unpack the retreat from a promised food-dye ban to a toothless voluntary tracker, the "precision agriculture" drone promises that have not materialized, and the arithmetic that defines the pillar: ~$700M into a new MAHA program while $1B+ in conservation commitments get clawed back. Then we ask the nursing questions: why a strategy obsessed with what's in kids' food stays silent on whether they have enough, and why "faster chemical approvals" is the opposite of upstream thinking.

Follow the labor. Follow the money. Sources and the FDA dye tracker are in our show notes: nursingthenation.substack.com

Nursing the Nation is hosted by Jamie Bourgeois and Melissa Anne DuBois. The opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any employer, institution, or organization.

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In the second half of our deep dive into the MAHA Strategy Report's third pillar, Jamie and Melissa take on pediatric mental health, screen time, vaping, substance use, and the report's favorite move: naming a youth crisis and then handing the responsibility to individual kids and families while quietly cutting every structural support that might actually help.

We unpack what the research really says about screens and mental health (spoiler: "screen time" as a single number is nearly meaningless), why the federal government's own data shows teen substance use at historic lows even as the report frames it as a worsening crisis, and what's actually worth watching — nicotine pouches, addiction hardening, and the push to bring back flavored vapes.

Then we get to the part that makes us angry: a strategy that claims to care about youth anxiety and depression while defunding the 988 Lifeline's LGBTQ+ youth service, omitting gendered and LGBTQ+ disparities from CDC data, attacking social-emotional learning, and moving to restrict psychiatric medications and gender-affirming care. As nurses, we call it what it is — a lethal contradiction. You don't get to break the safety net and then prescribe a walk in the park as the cure.

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The opinions on this podcast are our own and not representative of any employer, institution, or organization we may be affiliated with.