Interview: Ken White, Ph.D., a nursing and patient advocacy icon

Excerpt from an article we wrote for VCU Health Administration at the VCU College of Health Professions:

Kenneth R. White, Ph.D. (VCU ’96) traces his career back 50 years to an early patient — a Black man who was elderly, poor, and alone named Mr. Fisher.

Kenneth R. White, Ph.D., was honored in Richmond on Nov. 9 with the VCU Health Administration Lifetime Achievement & Service Award. Presenting the award is Paige Laughlin, a fellow VCU graduate who serves as Chief Operating Officer at HCA Florida Blake Hospital and is chair of the department’s alumni advisory council.

One night, White — then a teenage nursing assistant — was ordered by a doctor to get Mr. Fisher into a chair. The man refused.

“He was cantankerous, but I usually had a way with him,” White says. With a charge nurse, White lifted Fisher out of his bed and put him in a chair. Then, they secured him with a sheet so that he wouldn’t slide out. “It’s what we did back then,” White said.

But it was not, he admits, a patient-centered or even compassionate way to care for someone.

“Tomorrow will be a better day,” White, as he was leaving his shift, told Fisher, who replied: “I won’t be here tomorrow.” White repeated himself. But on arrival the next morning, indeed, Mr. Fisher was gone. He’d died in the night.

“He gave me my passion: We have to be voices for people who don’t have a seat at the table,” says White, who shares the story with audiences often. “He gave me a passion for patient-centered care, and advocacy for advance-care planning and respecting the wishes of patients with life limiting diseases or conditions."

Read the full piece on White, a VCU Health Administration professor emeritus whom we interviewed via Zoom at his home in Boston.