Health Care Heroes 2025
HEALTH CARE EDUCATOR: Lisa Wasson
HopeHealth community nurse educator
What led you to choose health care as your profession? When I was [young], my mother made a drastic career change. I watched how hard she worked to become a police officer. I watched her fight her way through the police academy; despite the discrimination and patriarchy she came up against, she persevered. I watched my mother make a difference in lives around us every day – at work and in her personal life. I always knew that I was not a future police officer, but I still wanted to positively affect the lives of others, like she did.
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How have you helped boost the quality of access to health care? By educating clinicians across the state about caring for patients at the end of life. Also, improving health care access by educating clinicians about services, such as palliative and hospice care so that they are better prepared to refer their patients for services that would benefit them the most at each stage of their illness.
What more do you feel the state can do to help further support the health care sector in Rhode Island? Raising their voices and using their votes to prevent any removal of funding for research and treatments for serious illnesses. Raising their voices and backing funding to support health care initiatives that will improve equality in care for marginalized groups in our state.
Are you confident patient access and quality of care will improve in Rhode Island over the next five years? Why or why not? Yes, because of research and education. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, the more we know, the better we do. Research provides us with more clarity on diseases and interventions, then educators pass that clarified information on to the clinicians at the bedside. We are all in this business of health care to help our fellow humans.
