Social Impacts on Health Care

By Lauren Coddington, Mark Dingfelder, Nora O’Connell, Armaan Punj

Playlist

This playlist features interview clips detailing how social factors, present and past, correlate with one’s relationship with and perspective of healthcare. The clips cover how present social support, childhood experiences, and family traditions affect one’s perspectives of healthcare and their social, emotional, and physical health. 

Clips from Vickey Everhart and Nellene Richardson allowed us to represent the crucial positive correlation between social support as an adult and a healthy relationship and perspective of healthcare. Vickey Everhart, an adoptive mother, discusses how after adopting a little boy with chronic illness, her community collaborates to support her financially as he undergoes more than 40 surgeries. Nellene Richardson, a health care worker, explains her experiences with treating and working with people suffering from addiction and the necessity for social support during treatment. 

Similarly, Sabra Hammond, Lisa McKeithan, and James Morgan display how parental circumstances during childhood developed their opinions and relationships with health care. Sabra Hammond, a Physician’s Assistant at CommWell, discusses her family’s strong emphasis on attaining quality healthcare from a young age and how that influenced her to pursue a role rooted in healthcare. Lisa McKeithan is a program director for Positive Life that grew up in Dunn. Her mother was a CNA and while growing up she saw what joy it brought her mother. As a result, she wanted to go into healthcare. Eventually, she specialized and started working on an HIV/AID project. James Morgan is a biochemist and pharmacist from Dunn. His father suffered from alcoholism, and he delves into how he dealt with that growing up, and how it affected the people around him. Throughout one’s childhood, their cultural experiences such as home remedies influence their perspectives and attitudes towards healthcare. Tammy Blackman, an x-ray technician at CommWell, talks about the home remedies her grandmother used to heal Tammy of various injuries and diseases. She talks about her experience helping the Latino and Hispanic community around her and caring for her parents through sickness.

When one receives plentiful social support throughout their upbringing or in their adulthood, they are more likely to continue forming a positive relationship with and perspective of healthcare as well as an improved state of personal well-being. This diverse set of clips allowed us to demonstrate the power of social factors in one’s personal attitudes towards and experiences of healthcare. 

Student Essays