 Good morning to the world out there. This is the House Human Services Committee on Wednesday, May 5th. And this morning, we're joined by Patricia Johnson, a nurse from Bennington. And we are taking up JRH 6, a joint resolution relating to racism as a public health emergency. And Patricia, welcome to our committee. I think this is your first time at our committee. And we'd love to welcome you. And I'm just going to call on people so they can introduce themselves quickly around. So you know who's at the table since we all know who you are from Bennington and why you're here. So Topper, could you go first and represent McFawn? Yes, I'm representative Francis McFawn. I represent Ferry Town. I represent Rosenquist. Thank you. Carl Rosenquist, I represent the town of Georgia. I represent Bromstead. Jessica Bromstead, and I represent Shelburne and St. George. Welcome. I represent Noyes. Good morning, Dan Noyes. I represent Wilkette Hyde Park, Johnson and Belvedere. I represent Whitman. Dan Whitman of Bennington. Good to see you, Patricia. Welcome. I represent Small. I'm representing Patricia Taylor Small, representing Winiski. And represent Payala. Good morning, Kelly Payala, representing London Dairy, Weston, Stratton, Jamaica and Winhall. And I'm Teresa Wood. I'm the vice chair of the committee and I represent Waterbury, Bolton, Beale, Score and Huntington. And our committee chair is slightly delayed this morning. And we have a couple of other committee members that will be joining us during your testimony. So my apologies for that. But hopefully in Zoom, it's a little less confusing because people can kind of pop on in the committee room. It's like people opening the doors and shutting the doors. And so welcome, Patricia. We are happy to have you here this morning. And I'm going to assume that you've you've read the joint resolution and are here to offer some testimony with regard to that resolution. And the floor is all yours. First of all, I wanted to say that it's a complete honor to be chosen to testify today on behalf of Vermoners and those people of color nationwide. It's no surprise to anyone. But we have had racism has been around since day one. And unfortunately, racism in the health world has been magnified by COVID. So what that means to me is that there have been a lot of health inequities. And we've been kind of slowly trying to chop away them. But COVID has magnified that and has shown how disproportionate health equity and the care that we provide is really a systemic issue here. And it's a serious public health threat. And it directly affects thousands of Vermoners here. Racism is not just discrimination against one group of person because of color, but it creates structural barriers and impacts the way that people make decisions. And we all know that you can only make informed decisions and knowledgeable decisions about your health if you're educated about your comorbidity or what could potentially happen if you continue to smoke cigarettes or have substance misuse issues. Social determinants have lifelong effects and can often be generational. And I think we're seeing a lot of that as you look at the physical and mental health of individuals. Generational, meaning mom is struggling, children begin to struggle, and then so on and so on. And the programming that we have is great, but we can do better. We need to meet people where they're at. I do not like ending a sentence in the preposition at, but it's very important that we start knocking on doors again, directly talking to people, not people with white coats and stethoscopes around their necks. I mean, that's great, but we need people to walk the beat, people to go into homes, people to make themselves available to have face times or to be available over the phone or have little groups where they're giving out little bits and pieces of education but making it fun and making and tailoring it to the person's gender, identity, racial, or cultural choosing. And that's where you're going to capture people. They're going to listen to their elders and they're going to listen to what the church says. They're going to follow the guidelines of a person of color who is educated and working in the system. It's not uncommon for people to say to me when they see me as a nurse, you live here? And I'm like, yes, I've lived here my whole entire life in Vermont. And they're like, oh my goodness. And then that breaks down barriers. They feel a little bit more comfortable getting information directly from me if they're a person of color, especially seeing when we publicize me getting the vaccine, that it was OK, that health-wise I was OK. We were able to then create BIPOC clinics that were specific to the needs of people of color. And that was only able to happen because it was driven by people of color. Everybody wants to be cared for by someone who looks like and thinks like them. And unfortunately, there's not a reflection in the state of Vermont of people who look like and who look like me. There are people who think like me, but not look like me. There's data that shows that ethnic groups and minorities in the United States are experiencing higher rates of illness and death. Examples are heart conditions, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma, and even the life expectancy is four years lower than the average white American. Four years. That's our own government statistics. So the data is there. We need to make a commitment to start evaluating policy in our system to make sure that we're using a health equitable lens. Make sure that we're using a diverse lens. And like I said, the pandemic just magnified the disproportion and the impact. We have had these things happening for many years prior. So it's very important that we confront the system, confront the policies, stop being a yes man or yes ma'am, and demand that things change. And I would like to have funds not trickle down through other governmental agencies. I would love to have funds come directly to me or directly to my counterparts that I'm working with or the agencies that I'm working with so that I can use the money for what I feel fit for my agency. We lose time and energy writing all these grants and explaining and scoring. And I know that's important, but we have a faster way of doing that now. Let's just make check marks. $5,000 is given to launch a healthy walking program. OK, great. Take a few pictures and get some testimony from a few people that are in the group and send it back to the government and say, this is what we're doing. This is how it works. Let's move on. We are being indicted by paperwork and that cuts down on the hands on work that we're able to do as nurses. And as nurses, we are the eyes and the ears of our patients. We're in the trenches working with people on a daily basis. We know what we need. We know what we want. We just need it now and we need it fast. Patricia, thank you. I should have perhaps asked this at the beginning because I don't know this personally and that means that probably other people do not know it either, but I know that you're a nurse, but are you a nurse at the hospital in Bennington? Do you work for Home Health? Or could you maybe describe a little bit about what your experience is? And that helps us give context to some of the comments that you just made. So I am a mother of three boys and have lived in Vermont my whole entire life for 36 years. I am a registered nurse in the emergency department Southwest Medical Center Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Excuse me. I am also the nurse manager at Recovery House, which is a substance misuse treatment facility. So I'm doing emergency medicine and addiction and they both go hand in hand and they both have spiked immensely during this pandemic. So I'm able to see multiple ways that funding in a more streamlined way directly to us would have a great benefit for both of these programs, whether it be the emergency room and crisis care with kiddos getting placed or food and housing resources. It's also hard for people, we're expecting people to do all these things, but when you are worrying about where you're gonna get your next meal from or when you don't understand the medications that and why they're so important for you to take on a daily basis and that they'll save your life and help you to live longer, it's difficult for you to focus on obtaining a job and making your preventative healthcare visits and being conscious of your blood pressure, et cetera. And having healthy coping skills during the pandemic has been really important to prevent relapse and there are a lot of people of color who do not engage in substance misuse treatment because of the stigma here in Vermont. That's very helpful to understand and as we all do, we all bring personal experiences to this and I just have to say that my dad received excellent care in the emergency room at your hospital and who knows, you may have even helped take care of him, I don't know, but and I know that the nurses there at your hospital have been recognized several times for the excellent quality of care that you have provided and have received national recognition and in terms of awards. So thank you, thank you for being here and I see we have a question from Representative Small and then Representative Rosenquist. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair and Patricia, thank you again for joining us this morning. Speaking of accolades, Representative Wood, I also believe that Patricia recently received an accolade in her own department for the work that she's doing at Southwestern Medical Center. And so once again, just recognizing the expertise and work that you are doing in the state and really appreciate that. I'd love to dig into, as you were talking about COVID in the way that it's illuminated a lot of these inequities when we're talking about health and specifically when we're talking about people of color. And wondering if you could talk more about that impact of having folks in communities see you take the vaccine and why that was so important for folks in your community. Sure, so thank you for the question Representative Small. So people of color and minorities were and still are considered to be essential workers. There were essential workers though that were not necessarily able to be frontline workers first in line to get the vaccination. So we had people of color who were working jobs that put them at risk for getting COVID-19 but were not vaccinated. And that's a health disparity. That's just disproportionate health access. That's a barrier. So me being able to say that the vaccine was created by people of color. The trial had people of color who voluntarily wanted to be a part of this. It helped to calm people's fears, ease their anxiety that we would be guinea pigs, that we were not receiving the full strength or the full dose and that we would in fact be getting the same vaccine that other people were getting. So by educating myself and educating others on the importance of vaccination, the makeup of the vaccination, letting people see that the people that helped created this vaccine and it wasn't just created overnight or during the pandemic, it's been years that they've been working on this helped to reassure people. And that sometimes you have to give a little bit of more information to people in small doses that they can understand and doses that are tailored specifically to them. So the message is that vaccination is gonna help get life back to the way it used to be. And then that message is gonna look different for everybody. You can't put everybody in a square peg. We might have some triangles, some circles, some octagons, some rhombuses. Something that really stood out in you describing that was this piece of worrying about not getting the full strength of the dose or being a guinea pig or even this piece of voluntarily taking the vaccine. These are all things that I did not consider when the vaccine was coming out. I assumed that I would be getting the full strength. I assumed that it would be to benefit my health. And so why does that exist within black communities or within people of color communities around this version two vaccines or a thought that they might not be getting the full strength? So it's no secret. People of color have been marginalized, abused, and used without consent in many, many medical experiments, trials. It's more than just the Tuskegee syphilis trial. It's the procedure of the C-section was done on African-American slave women, perfected, so to speak, on African-American slave women. You know, people have Henrietta Lacks, her heel cells are still growing to this day. We're taken without her consent. And these are things that aren't that long ago. These are things that are within our generation. These are things that are within our parents' generation. And when you see these happening, you need to pause and discuss how does this make you feel? And why do you feel this way? And then educate, educate, educate, that we have things in place, checks and balances that make it illegal for people to do these things anymore. And so the health benefit of you getting the vaccine and really talking about the benefits of it. You know, I even showed a group, LL Cool J, on Cirrus XM Radio, did a show on why it was so important to get the vaccine. I was able to capture the attention of some people of color just by promoting that video, because why? It was a person of color, and it was also a person who they had a lot of respect for and he's a musical icon. So we have to change the tune, we have to change our language. And I was afraid that maybe something might happen to me, but I also knew that in order to protect my parents and to try to help with the herd immunity, that it was my part as a healthcare worker to get the vaccine and then use my experience to help educate others who had vaccine hesitancy. Thank you so much. Thank you, Representative Small. Representative Rosenquist and then Representative Whitman. And I just want to point out that we're closing in on 9.30, I want to allow plenty of time and allow Patricia to have a little bit of a break between now and when she has to, go on to her next obligation at 10. So Representative Rosenquist. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair. Excuse me, and good morning, Patricia, and thank you for coming. My concern with this resolution is the term racism as the central focus on this. You would seem, and you've said it yourself, there's racial, economic, cultural, ethnic, and I call it situational disparities in our society. And I believe that is what we're concentrating on and then we need to address. And so by saying racism, it seems that one, we're using a term that has a lot of extra baggage and gets people more separated than it does bringing them together. And I was just wondering, you used many of the terms I used there in your introductory comments and I was just, would appreciate your reaction to that. In other words, I would change racism to racial, cultural, ethnic, and situational disparities must be addressed as a priority in our state. That's what I would suggest we do with this resolution. Thank you. So Representative Rosenquist, I apologize. I didn't hear part of your question, but are you asking for my feedback on the word racism in? Yeah, I mean, pretty much overall. I'm sorry, hold on one. I'm sorry. It looks like Patricia is trying to do this at work. So I'm so sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Yep. So Patricia, so I mean, basically what I was asking is, to me it's a broader issue in one way than racism. There are cultural issues. There are ethnic issues and I call it situational issues like people coming to this country that are trying to survive as they come to this country having nothing to do with race, but the fact that they are non-citizens possibly or whatever. So I just think it's a broader issue and should racism for one thing, as I say, it divides us more than it brings us together to try to solve these disparities and the disparities are alarming. There's no two ways about it. And as you said in this COVID pandemic days, it brought more of these to light than I think some of us realize, but thank you. So I guess I was just asking for your reaction to changing the word racism to something that's more inclusive. So racism is not just discrimination. It's structural barriers that have been placed up by society to prevent people from getting access to the healthcare that they're entitled to or the housing that they're entitled to or the food that they're entitled to as a human being. So racism is killing people. Racism creates inequities. And when we as a culture acknowledge that systemically, racism is holding us back and dividing us, then we can change the language. But right now we haven't dug deep enough into our policies and procedures to comfortably make that change because we're still pumping out policies and procedures that do not reflect health equity. People are dying. People are trying to conduct daily routine, activities and might not come home. There is a real sense of... There are some things that some cultures and families and ethnic backgrounds do not have to experience, but there are some things that I carry with me every day that others do not have to carry with them. So when I'm a nurse and I'm working with a patient, I have yet to see a patient say they don't want the white nurse, but I have as early as two weeks ago had a client spit in my face and call me a neighbor 30 times and tell me that she did not want me to be her healthcare worker. So racism is a serious public health threat. Racism, racial slurs are fighting words that invoke someone to become defensive possibly or have to defend themselves. And until we have systemic policy and procedures in place that protect people of color or help elevate them to the level of others and the healthcare that the others are receiving, then we can't change that language because we would be dismissive. It would be sweeping it under the rug. I have fears that other moms don't have necessarily because my children have black and brown skin and are driving, are they more at risk to be pulled over? Yes, what data shows us that are Vermont state data and what is that called racial profiling falls under the category of racism. But I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, you're fine. I do, I want representative Rosen quest one day soon we will be able to take that word out of the health threat and I look forward to that day with you. Thank you very much, Patricia. I appreciate it. I just wanted to thank you for being so clear and succinct, Patricia. It was, I've written down your words as fast as I could because I felt like they were just so on point and clearly understood. So thank you for that. I represent Whitman and then I think that we should let the witness have the final words if she has any additional final words and appreciate that. So represent Whitman. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair and thank you so much, Patricia for being here and speaking really appreciate all of the work that you're doing. So thank you. I just, you answered most of my question just now. So thank you for that. And I just wanted to go back really quick to one point and that so sometimes people talk about, you know seeking equality within our services versus you mentioned in health equity lens. So I think we're kind of dealing with this question about to what extent to acknowledge racism and the importance of racial identity. And you said that actually tailoring to racial identity would begin to help us with some of these discrepancies in health outcomes. Is that correct? It's correct. So health equity means making sure that people have what they need when they need it and giving them what they need to get there. And that might mean if I give everybody in this room an apple representative Whitman, your apple might need to be peeled because you have an allergy to the pectin in the apple skin and representative Ren quest, you Rosen quest you might need your apple to be sliced because you have peanut butter that you're gonna have with yours and that's how you're gonna best digest it. And representative Bromstead, you might just want your apple whole but need help twisting off the stem, the stem. So as you can, as you can see everybody in the room was given an apple but we all had maybe some, we needed more support in order to enjoy the apple. And if we can help each other by peeling the apple, taking the peel off, cutting it up so that he can eat it with peanut butter and then twisting the stem off we're all able to enjoy the same things and be healthy. But we've had to do a little bit more work to make some things happen but we're all ending up with the same thing in the end, the apple. Thank you so much. Is that, do you have any other questions to represent Whitman? No. I use the apple because my dad is pruning all his fruit trees now. Well, what you might not know about representative Whitman is that he also works on landscaping. Oh, nice. So Patricia, I just wanted to so sincerely thank you for what I know is taking a significant chunk, a valuable chunk out of your very, very busy work day and so appreciating the direct perspective of a healthcare professional who is a woman of color working in our state and living in our state who's a mom who you carry so many things on your shoulders. So I just so very much appreciate the time that you've taken in our committee to share your experiences and to share your wisdom with us. It's been very valuable this morning. We can't hear you, Patricia. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being so flexible and willing to work with me. This is another example of how some people might need a little bit more support in order to make things happen in life. And I appreciate you being able to work with me and around me so that I'm able to speak with you guys today. If you need anything or would like to contact me, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm on social media. I have email and my cell phone. The texting is the best way. I'm learning how to prioritize emails and I have not successfully done well on that task yet. But feel free to call or text me. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here and have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Same to you. Alrighty. Bye-bye. Bye.