Daisy Smith, RN: Helping to Raise Community Awareness of Health Disparity Issues

By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor

When we finally got together with Daisy Smith for a conversation, we found her at the Fairview Nursing Home on an early Sunday evening. That was one of the few times the retired nurse could manage to work us into her still very hectic schedule.

She was in the room of James Bell, her longtime patient who neither hears nor speaks. Smith has been helping to care for Bell for about 17 years, she said.

How long have you been retired, we first asked.

“I have never retired,” replied Smith. “I just don’t get paid for what I do anymore.”

But for the record, Smith, who became a registered nurse in 1963 when she graduated from the Medical College of Ohio with honors, retired first from Mercy Health Partners in 1975 and then from Cordelia Martin Health Center in 2000.

These days she just takes it easy … taking care of numerous patients such as Bell, working on various community service organizations such as the Toledo Council of Black Nurses, completing on her master’s degree at The University of Toledo, participating on the Commission on Minority Health, helping to plan events such as this weekend’s Community Health, Wellness and Weight Loss Challenge Health Fair …

Well, perhaps she has a point. Perhaps she really isn’t retired at all.

Certainly the primary reason for the fact that Smith has not eased into retirement is that she just loves what she does and has been doing for the past four and a half decades.

“Helping people … I like the hands on nursing,” said Smith. “I rarely had a chance to do that because people always put me in managerial positions.”

Smith became clinical manager of Riverside Hospital after earning her RN and assumed the same duties at Parkview Hospital a year later. She took on additional such duties at Mercy Hospital in 1969.

In 1981, Smith organized, with the help of friends and fellow nurses such as Mary Gregory and Donna Todd, the Toledo Council of Black Nurses.

“During those years there were very few black nurses,” said Smith of the reason for founding the group. “I was one of the first and there was a need for more black nurses. There was also a need in the black community for preventive health education … black nurses could fill that need.”

Indeed during those days, Smith found herself being the “first” at any number of institutions – Riverside, Mercy, Parkview. The first and only black nurse at most hospitals.
 

In fact, when Smith started her nursing career in the 1960’s, black patients were being cared for not in hospital rooms but in the hallways of the institutions. “That motivated me to choose community outreach,” she said.

Over the years, the Toledo Council of Black Nurses has maintained an active core membership of Smith, Gregory and Todd and has consistently engaged in community activities designed to educate the community on health matters. “We have been in public schools, in churches. We have given scholarships to individuals to pursue nursing,” said Smith. They have also engaged the assistance of established medical institutions to help them in their endeavors.
 

And Smith has no doubts about the success the Council has had over the years in educating the community and preventing disease.

The almost three decades since the formation of the Toledo Council of Black Nurses has seen an increasing emphasis on examining and rectifying the health disparities that minority groups face. Daisy Smith is, in no small measure, one of those responsible for that enhanced emphasis.

In the late 1970’s one would have searched in vain for a publication detailing such disparities. Smith and her collaborator, UT’s Dr. James Price, first began to examine health disparities and eventually published the first articles written on such issues.

The results of such groundbreaking work are the formation of a local Commission on Minority Health and a pediatric facility at the Cordelia Martin Health Center named, appropriately enough, the Daisy Smith Pediatrics Center.

“We should continue with disease prevention and education, there always seems to be a need,” said Smith of what the future looks like for the Council. “And we need to continue to organize and encourage upward educational mobility.”

The mother of three grown children, Smith continues her own upward educational mobility as she juggles all of her other responsibilities. Now a master’s candidate, she earned a bachelor’s of education from UT in 1996.

A native of East St. Louis, IL, Smith came to Toledo with her husband who died shortly after the birth of their third child.

“I was a very fortunate person … a single mother who lived in the projects,” said Smith. While she worked as a nurse, Smith recalled, her neighbors would watch her children free of charge. All three would go on to graduate from college and have productive professional careers.

This weekend’s project, The Community Health Fair, is an example how the Toledo Council of Black Nurses have influenced community awareness of health issues. About a decade or so, the Council approached Vince Davis, owner of a State Farm agency and a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., about reaching out to men in the African-American community to for prostate cancer screenings.

According to Smith, the Council felt they would have more credibility if they partnered with a men’s organization.

The prostate screenings have been going strong ever since and Davis has been inspired to broaden that outreach by organizing the quarterly health fairs, the one this weekend in conjunction with the annual African American Festival at the Scott Park Campus.

Free health screenings – for diabetes, cholesterol, hypertension, HIV, BMI and lead – will be held on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

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