Dr. Elizabeth Madigan sometimes raises eyebrows with her assertion that every nurse is effectively serving as a global health nurse.
However, the immediate past chief executive officer of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing maintains that an increasingly interconnected world requires a new perspective for healthcare providers.
Dr. Elizabeth Madigan, the previous CEO of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, is the keynote speaker at the 17th annual Dorothy Hussain Distinguished Lecture on Oct. 1.
“It doesn’t matter where you practice, you’re doing global health whether you know it or not,” Madigan said. “Because of how the world works with migration and immigration, you’re taking care of patients from other countries or you’re working with nurses from other countries.”
Madigan will be the keynote speaker at the 17th annual Dorothy Hussain Distinguished Lecture, which this year is focused on advancing global health and equity.
The free, public lecture hosted by The University of Toledo College of Nursing takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 1, in Collier Building Room 1000 A/B on the Health Science Campus. Attendees can also connect virtually, via WebEx.
Individuals can register to attend in-person or virtually through the College of Nursing website.
A native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, Madigan is a registered nurse who has extensively practiced in and researched home healthcare. She has served in senior administrative clinical roles and spent more than two decades on the nursing faculty at Case Western Reserve University, where she led global health initiatives and provided consultation in multiple countries for home care and aging care in the community.
From 2017 to 2023, she was CEO of Sigma, during which time the nursing honor society added 72 new chapters, including chapters in Ireland, Jamaica, Israel, Scotland, Italy, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Indonesia, Finland, Chile and Sierra Leone.
Sigma Theta Tau is an international nursing organization of more than 100,000 members dedicated to advancing knowledge, teaching, learning and service through practice, education and research.
Madigan’s lecture at UToledo will focus on migration trends and their impact on healthcare, the potential nursing shortage in the United States and how nurses can make meaningful contributions to global health
“In clinical practice, you’re taking care of those patients on that day and you don’t really think about the larger world,” she said. “I’m really trying to get them to think about the bigger picture. There are policy discussions that happen within their communities and the country that are global health issues, and nurses have expertise that can bring value to those discussions. We tend to be a self-deprecating profession, and I’d like us to be a little bolder.”
Other panelists at this year’s lecture include:
• Richard Paat, an internal medicine specialist and chief medical officer for the UToledo CommunityCare Clinics;
• Marilynne Wood, professor emerita of nursing at UToledo;
• Susan Batten, an associate professor in the College of Nursing; and
• Rosario Sanchez, an assistant professor and research administrator of the UToledo Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute.
Dr. S. Amjad Hussain, professor emeritus of cardiovascular surgery and humanities at UToledo, will serve as the moderator.
The lecture is named after the late Dorothy Gladys Hussain, whose professional career spanned 32 years as a staff nurse and critical care nurse at the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital. She was known for patient advocacy and championing patients’ rights.
