About Kathleen and Jacinda

Two hosts of the podcast "Exposing the Toxic Truths" discuss their nursing backgrounds and their interest in environmental health. Kathleen, a NICU nurse, has seen the impact of external factors on patient health and wants to explore the environmental component of health. Jacinda, a public health nurse, focuses on understanding the impact of climate health and environmental exposures on the populations she serves. They are interested in learning more about the disproportionate effects of toxic chemicals on individuals and populations. Hello, listeners. We thought we'd add an extra episode just to give you a little bit more information and get to know of your host on Exposing the Toxic Truths. We wanted to let you guys know a little bit about our nursing background and how it is we became hosts of a podcast talking about toxic chemicals. A little bit about us. We are classmates getting our master's in public health. Through this process, we've joined an organization called California Nurses for Environmental Health and Justice, where we've been able to get involved in topics that are of interest, including our interest in environmental health, climate change effects on health, and then, of course, any topics related to maternal child health because we both work in that division, whether it's acute care or public health. Just go ahead and take a listen and we appreciate all your support. My name is Kathleen. I am a NICU nurse and I've been a NICU nurse for 10 years. I feel like that has flown by. I'm married and I have a three-year-old at home and currently pregnant right now. I'm getting into my second trimester. I just wanted to tell you guys a little bit about myself and the course of my career and how I ended up here doing a podcast on toxic chemicals. A little bit about me, as a bedside nurse for the last 10 years, I've seen a lot of sick moms and as a result, the babies are sick. A lot of these cases are complex and you naturally, as a nurse, are trying to understand how we got to this point and understand all the factors that affected this patient's health. I have found that many of these factors have leaded to upstream problems, things that could have potentially improved outcomes had I known a little bit more about those situations. Whether that's getting access to care, having good prenatal care, eating well, having access to good and healthy food, those sorts of things. It's led me to explore those external factors, the environmental component of health, and I'm just excited to be finally chasing this interest of mine because I am a tired nurse that's fatigued from the chronic and the sick. That's a little bit about why I'm here and why we're talking. How about you, Jacinda? Can you tell us a little bit about your nursing background? Yeah. Hey, everyone. My name's Jacinda and my nursing background has been primarily public health nursing for the last 13 years, primarily working in communicable disease and maternal child and adolescent health, primarily in the community and on the prevention side. Like you, Kathleen, I'm kind of thinking upstream, what are things that are impacting the populations that I serve and affecting things like access to fresh fruits and vegetables, to asthma rates, to impacts on infant death rates, and with communicable diseases, just looking at things like why do we see more valley fever or coccidioidomycosis and how is that connected to climate health and other vector-borne diseases and how that's connected to climate health as well. We're just seeing a lot of uptick in a lot of things and trying to understand this relationship that the health of the populations that I serve are impacted by climate health and by their exposures to the environment. As we dive into this podcast, I'm very interested in learning more about who is disproportionately affected by toxic chemicals and what does this impact look like on an individual level but also on the population level, which I often see.