Health Care Heroes 2025
NURSE: Justin A. Millan
HopeHealth registered nurse
What led you to choose health care as your profession? It was a second career. I wanted an honest job that was challenging on a technical level, meaningful and humane.
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How have you helped boost the quality of access to health care? All my successes have come from a team effort. I do nothing alone. We have led initiatives on safety, medication upgrades and expanded access to critical treatments.
What is the biggest challenge you and your organization are facing this year? The threat of losing funding and reimbursement. We invest in staffing. Nurses and aides on my unit have realistic assignments; this allows them to be attentive to the patient and their family. This is central to our mission statement. But that’s not cheap. If we lost funding, it would be very difficult to maintain a high level of care.
What more do you feel the state can do to help further support the health care sector in Rhode Island? Invest and innovate in primary care. Find some way, somehow to draw in and retain primary care physicians.
Are you confident patient access and quality of care will improve in Rhode Island over the next five years? Why or why not? There are some promising initiatives at our nursing and physician schools. The state’s special commission from last year looked into expanding primary care physician access and it was encouraging; we have yet to see what will come of it. They talked about adding another medical school. Organizations such as Primary Care for All Americans are at ground zero of this crisis, both locally and nationally. However, without a viable primary care system, I am concerned about where we are headed.
Tell us one thing that most people don’t know about you. I paint in my free time.
