Carmen Sceppa is the new dean of the Bouvé College of Health Sciences and wants to talk about the ongoing crisis of American healthcare throughout the United States. One of her goals is to form a national healthcare leadership role for Bouvé with consensus among its three divisions: the School of Pharmacy, the School of Nursing, and the School of Health Professions.
At the Northeastern University, Sceppa is pursuing areas of interdisciplinary study in line with Northeastern 2025. It is the university’s academic plan, which creates a globally networked ecosystem for learning, research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Her research is basically focused on the well-being of the elderly in terms of preventive medicine, lifestyle choices, and other areas.
She believes that the healthcare system is ever changing. She wants to know how the clinicians in the real world can inform the researchers about the barriers in delivering quality care, based on emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, data, analytics, devices, etc. Here, she finds opportunities for Bouvé to work across colleges within the university and with partners across the world.
With the experience of being a minority in the US, she would like to create a culture of inclusion and diversity. She chose not to practice medicine there because she was against seeing patients for 5-10 minutes, and not being able to develop a relationship so that she could understand the patient. Thus, she went on the route of research and education.
She talks about Bouvé and says that inter-professional approach is robot-proof. There is competency of working as a team, where you have to understand the other disciplines, in the way that a nurse works with the physical therapist, the nutritionist, the pharmacist, and others. Students majoring in health sciences, can do interdisciplinary work in data science, business administration, environmental health, sociology, and psychology. Those are the five big domains influencing public health.
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman