Where do you call home?   

Officially, I moved to Florida 4 years ago. I think, like many people during the start of the pandemic, I was looking for a change, but I still view Chicago as my home and at some point I’ll probably be going back there.  

When did you first become interested in law?   

It was kind of a serendipitous route. During my master’s in social work I had two placements, one each year. The first one was as a federal parole and probation officer and the second one was as a police social worker. In both of these positions I found myself in front of courtrooms and judges and it began to interest me as to how I might integrate what I knew about my nursing career and my social work career into a law degree.    

Is there anything you’ve learned – either in the classroom or outside it – that has changed your perception of law or justice?  

Certainly, in the world that we live in today, I am very saddened by the fact that law and justice don’t seem to work equally for everybody. I have always felt that and, as a nurse, I clearly saw the disparities in health care long before that was ever talked about or published in the literature. When I talk to my students about the law, I tell them sometimes you have to figure out how to make the law work for people that need it, because it isn't really designed necessarily for everyone equally. Try to find a way to make the law work for everyone, and to make sure that everybody, regardless of their health or their stature, has equal justice. 

Prior to going to law school, you worked as a registered nurse in adult and pediatric intensive care units and trauma emergency departments. How did that inform your appreciation for the health care side of health care law?  

I really loved that job. I don't think there is another job where I felt at the end of every day that I made a difference in peoples’ lives. Working in trauma, in hospitals, where there were a lot of people that were uninsured, where the outcomes people experienced, the way they were treated, and the opportunities they had to be treated were really dependent on their station in life – I realized, it just didn't seem fair. I often saw people that waited too long to get health care because they didn't have the money to seek it out, or they didn’t know a physician or a provider they could go to. One of the things I'm most proud of with my legal career is that I've always tried to figure out how to make the law work best for those people. 

You’ve written numerous textbooks related to health care law – what motivated you to identify and fill those gaps?  

The job I held longest was as the in-house counsel and director of patient safety and risk management at an organization that was made up of academic medical centers across the country. I was really steeped in that job among academic people and realized that there wasn't good guidance for risk managers and the lawyers that I worked with on how to evolve the field and make it more current to the issues they were facing.  

I wrote my first book around 1990, and once you write one book, you get opportunities to write a lot more. So, I have written a lot more and updated the material I've written initially, just to reflect the changes in the field. 

You’ve spent most of your time in the Midwest, what drew you to working with the University of South Carolina?  

I was foundational in starting the first health law online program at Loyola (University Chicago). I worked with some great people for 16 years, and the program really grew and became well respected. Then other law schools started these kinds of programs. When I looked into the position at the University of South Carolina, a friend of mine that worked there encouraged me to apply, and I knew that since they were a young startup program that I had a lot of knowledge in my head that I could share to grow something new. 

What do you think is the potential impact of working in health care law? 

I think we're still thinking through how broad the reach can be. What is very clear in present day society is that many people are experiencing health care challenges and issues they didn't even think of two years ago, where the law hasn't really responded or hasn't responded equally. I will be telling students that this is a change that is not for the faint of heart; working in health care means you have to always be flexible enough to know when change is needed, and you have to advocate for changes that might not be popular at the time you're advocating for them. As a health care provider, or somebody working in the health care industry, you're taught to be an advocate. As a lawyer, you’re trained to be an advocate. And I think that using our educational skills in a program like this to advance social justice is really my primary passion.