The universe answered my plea for help with Spring Fever. The answer was meetings. The first meeting was with a graduating doctoral student who now faces career choices and corresponding angst about which choice to make. The best I could do was listen and confirm that all points had been considered. There really isn't much in life that prepares us for making such life course altering decisions. Another student needed guidance on the structure of the MPH essay and support in standing ground so as to not be abused by other faculty. (Sometimes I can't believe my colleagues, nor non-colleagues.)  Then I met with and hired a doctoral student to be my new RA for the AHRQ grant. In mix was also meetings being canceled and rescheduled, and meetings in the process of being scheduled. The last meeting was the most interesting.  And, in between I did a little of this and that.  The hallways were very quiet now that classes are over.

The last telephone meeting was with one of the local health departments. We talked about public health nursing and the very real and very big changes that are facing public health nursing. The shift from an individual and family focused public health care delivery system to a population focused mindset requires new skills of everyone. This shift is a welcomed change on one hand, but dreaded on the other. It's dreaded by the managers because their funding is still program specific and the programs are individual level care programs. This creates a fiscal bind for the health departments; neither the states nor the feds seem to shifting their requirements for funding or reimbursing health promotion or protection programs.  While the conversation was good, it left me feeling a bit like Atlas ~ carrying the weight of how to make all this happen on behalf of public health nurses.