2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

These panelists will discuss their oral histories of nurse practitioners, students pursuing healthcare careers, and peer supporters for individuals with opioid use disorder. These projects promote an exploration of the shifting meanings of care, the tensions caregivers face when their care clashes with the priorities of the systems in which they learn and work, and the role of storytelling in caregiving communities
"You Have a Story that Could Help a lot of People": Building a Peer Support Movement during the Opioid Epidemic
Ethan Sharp, Kentucky State University

For this project, I recorded the oral histories of participants in the peer support movement to assist in the recovery of individuals with Substance Use Disorder (SUD) in Kentucky from 2019 through 2021. This paper explores why peer support services have become a crucial element in efforts to stem the opioid epidemic, and through close examination of one recording, the paper demonstrates that sharing one’s story is the primary means by which peer support specialists provide comfort, encouragement, and hope to people struggling with SUD.

Medicine of Care: Oral History of the Nurse Practitioners in the 1980-1990s
Morag Martin, SUNY Brockport

For this project, a team of nursing students and I interviewed 30 Nurse Practitioners who trained in the 1980s and 1990s, when the profession was adapting to the needs of communities and expanding its scope and responsibilities. In this presentation, I discuss how the interviewees perceived their changing roles and the choices they made in their professional and personal lives.

Navigating the Challenges of Healthcare Training During a Global Pandemic: The MCPHS University COVID-19 Pandemic Oral History Project
Carrie Schultz, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

The MCPHS University COVID-19 Pandemic Oral History Project is documenting students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper looks at some of the challenges students training for careers in the healthcare industry have faced during the pandemic and examines students’ reflections on how the pandemic influenced their decision to pursue employment in the healthcare sector.ABSTRACT​: Nurse practitioners, students pursuing healthcare careers, and certified substance use disorder recovery peer supporters are three groups that may not appear to have much in common. Yet these groups all engage in communities of care in the modern United States, their stories shaped by the larger social, political, and economic contexts of their time. By preserving and telling these groups’ stories in the form of oral history interviews, we highlight the challenges in providing care through periods of innovation (the new profession of Nurse Practitioners), crisis (healthcare students during COVID-19), and recovery (opioid use disorder). All three papers in this session focus on listening to and preserving the stories told by caregivers. Registered nurses training to be Nurse Practitioners during the 1980s and 1990s chose to push their education into the realm of medicine, leaving behind their primary identity as support providers to redefine their position in the quickly changing U.S. healthcare system. More recently, the students at MCPHS University were faced with unique opportunities to train as healthcare providers during the pandemic, while also reimagining how their education might prepare them for a post-COVID medical landscape. Finally, as Kentucky has experienced one of the highest rates of death from Opioid Use Disorder, the state has enlisted certified peer supporters to provide personalized care that supplements more traditional forms of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment. As people with SUD recover, many find that storytelling itself is a form of care that provides encouragement and hope. These oral history projects center the stories of caregivers struggling with the meaning of care within their student and professional communities and the tensions that sometimes arise when caring for people conflicts with the priorities of institutional medicine in the United States. Additionally, these presentations speak to the conference’s theme of past, present, and future. The panelists’ papers reflect on how past caregiving models inform the work of present-day caregivers and provide today’s healthcare practitioners and support providers with ideas for revolutionizing their models of care as they move into the future. ​​​