10/27/2022

Member Spotlight: Gary Glauberman

Gary Glauberman is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Advanced Population Health Nursing Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He joined ACHNE in 2016 when he became a new instructor in community health nursing and found ACHNE when looking for a place that would provide community outside of his university colleagues. After receiving a research grant from ACHNE in 2019, he was motivated to get more involved and is currently Co-Chair of the nominating committee.

Gary is passionate about emergency preparedness. Prior to becoming an instructor, he was part of the Medical Reserve Corps and was a responder with the Red Cross. He carried those passions into his role as a faculty member. Hawaii is vulnerable to disasters, so he tries to build capacity in faculty and students, who can then help create a better-prepared community.

Gary has worked with health professional faculty at his university to create an interprofessional disaster simulation, which deals with the aftermath of a disaster. It has evolved from a full-scale moulage and triage into a tabletop exercise and was moved to fully online in 2020. In its last implementation, the exercise was attended by over 100 students and has grown to involve students and faculty from nursing, public health, sociology, medicine, and pharmacy.

Gary’s research also focuses on disaster preparedness, with his most recent funded research being a qualitative study of emergency preparedness in families with young children in underserved communities, such as the Native Hawaiian, Pacific Island, and Filipino communities. The study is just getting started this month, but Gary hopes what is learned will lead to interventions that can be implemented at community health centers and clinics.

Gary would like ACHNE members to know that we need community health nursing faculty in each school to become more active in examining climate change and health and communicating nursing’s role in climate change at the individual, systems, and community levels of practice. We need to design strong simulations and clinical experiences that help students link macro happenings with individual patients, and textbooks need to do that better as well. Nurses should be leading research on climate change and how it impacts communities, which are often not equipped for the changes that are already occurring.

Finally, Gary would like to thank ACHNE for the sense of community and camaraderie it provides.