The Power of Passion and Persistence: Dr. Stephanie Ferguson’s Global Health Journey
By Anshu Shroff
Dr. Stephanie L. Ferguson is vivacious, her energy — contagious. These are must-have characteristics for someone who has traveled to over a hundred countries as a technical advisor for the World Health Organization and the International Council of Nurses, is the President of the White House Fellows Foundation and Association, and serves as the founder and CEO of Stephanie L. Ferguson & Associates, LLC. (her own consulting firm), in addition to her many other accomplishments.
As a scientist, entrepreneur, professor, and motivational speaker, Dr. Ferguson’s passion for nursing goes back to her childhood. Inspired by her own school nurse, who she visited often due to asthma, Dr. Ferguson pursued becoming a nurse-aid at 13-years-old:
“I realized, she’s the school nurse, but she’s also the county nurse, and she takes care of 1,000 of us, but then she takes care of a population of 10,000. And it just changed my mindset about how a person who has a passion for children can change the world and help students like myself who suffered from asthma, parents working, couldn’t come and get me. And that would shape the rest of my life.”
Dr. Ferguson had to overcome all the legal hurdles to be permitted to work at such a young age, and she looked after 40 elderly patients at 13-years-old, herself. Passion, she says, gets you to wake up and do whatever it takes.
The Voices in Leadership series invited Dr. Stephanie Ferguson to share a candid conversation with Dr. Sara Bleich, Professor of Public Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Their conversation and Dr. Ferguson’s life’s journey elucidated ways to approach leadership challenges in global health.
“Well, first of all, public service is where it’s at. If you want to change things, if you want to change the world, you have got to learn how to manage populations and work with people.”
Get Micro to Macro
Dr. Ferguson encouraged healthcare providers to look beyond the bedside illness of individual patients to look at the social determinants of health that impact patients outside the clinic:
“… I also realized, because of teen pregnancies and children being born that were very small and very sick, I needed to go and see what’s happening. Why is this happening? And I was a scientist at that point. It’s like, this is the same zip code. This is the same school system. This is the same neighborhood. This has got to stop.”
Dr. Ferguson spoke to the fact that solving individual problems will not prevent similar cases from returning and that systemic challenges cannot be solved using stopgap approaches. Healthcare providers are trained to make assessments, diagnose, intervene, collaborate and evaluate, and they should use these skills to make larger impacts on public health.
Get Everyone to the Table and Build Consensus
“But then, if you want to change the world, you’ve got to bring everybody to the table……When you get all of the same people, they don’t get along. And next thing you know, it’s like, well, what did you all achieve? And most of the time, people can’t tell you, because you didn’t achieve a thing.”
Sharing her experiences of having worked within very divided structures, Dr. Ferguson explained that having similar people at the table does not guarantee that goals will be achieved. As such, it is important to get all stakeholders to the table and work towards a consensus that creates a win-win situation for everyone.
“And so what I’ve learned is, you have to have consensus. Most people like working with me because I try to get people to have consensus. If you just do a vote — the majority say this, the minority say this — you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people. But if you can build consensus and say, OK, what can we agree to do — just give me three things. Just give me, what can we agree on?”
And while it may prove difficult, using critical judgment backed by science and evidence will make way for enabling change, ensuring that these changes are sustainable and what is given is not eventually taken away. “The worst thing you can do with a group of people is to give them something and then take it away from them,” she cautioned.
Assessment is Key in Global Health
Talking about differences in global health concerns across countries, Dr. Ferguson explained that threats to global health see no borders. The same disease can affect people in any country, no matter the size. This relates to the fact that similar crises often present in different ways. Given this, practitioners need flexibility when approaching public health concerns in different parts of the world. “You meet them where they are, and you turn that around,” she says. It is important to understand the bigger picture of the state of affairs in a country, not just health, through asking questions like: What are the priorities of the country? Where is the government spending its money? How is the government supporting its population? What are the critical issues for that country’s scientists? And whose voices really matter? It is crucial to do a landscape assessment in this way before addressing a public health concern in a new place.
Dr. Ferguson also emphasized the need to talk to communities to understand their perspectives on the issues they are facing. She believes that communities are better aware of their own challenges than outsiders are and often know feasible ways to address those concerns. So it is important to have community members on the team and bring together expertise from different areas of specialization in order to bring about policy level improvements.
Don’t Try to Be Somebody You’re Not
In an additional piece of advice, Dr. Ferguson advised aspirational women to identify their passion and find good mentors with whom they can have deep conversations. If one is not invited to a table, they should ask to be there, join in any capacity, and listen and learn what people say and how they say it:
“Well, the first thing is, what’s your passion? And if you figure out what your passion is, what makes you get up whether you get paid or not … And so that’s my first thing. Don’t try to be somebody you’re not.
The other thing I tell women who say, I didn’t get invited to the table — well, it’s always nice to ask. I’m a firm believer in that. But you’re a citizen. So you can show up. Just show up. If there are no chairs, bring your own chairs. Women, we’re resourceful. You can find a chair.”
Awakening is a Lifelong Journey
Dr. Stephanie Ferguson’s talk was imbued with wisdom, with the resonating axiom: “There are no permanent friends or enemies”. She emphasized the need to be able to build partnerships, cross the bridge when conflict occurs, and accept differences only as a matter of the present moment. She reminded the audience that working in global health is, by nature, challenging, and it requires resilience and persistence. And true to her vivacious nature, her presence in the studio reminded everyone that, no matter what the burden of disease and the state of health they were trying to improve, people can find ways to be themselves and transmit infectious humor.
Story written by Anshu Shroff. Anshu is a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) candidate, class of ’21 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Humanitarian Studies, Ethics and Human Rights concentrator at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Anshu’s research focuses on systemic issues of disaster risk resilience. Her interests include: inter-sectoral approaches to climate risk resilience; disaster risk management; inclusion & human rights; international development; access and sustainability of global health systems; and, socio-economic equity. Anshu worked at the United Nations in New York before joining Harvard University. She has worked on global evaluations of key UNDP projects and led evaluations through UN’s oversight body, OIOS, in Africa and the Caribbean.
Story edited by Sherine Andreine Powerful, MPH, a second-year Doctor of Public Health student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A Diasporic Jamaican, she received her Bachelor’s degree in Latin American and International Studies from Yale University and holds a Master of Public Health degree in Population and Family Health, with a concentration in Global Health, from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Her interests, centered around the English-speaking Caribbean, include feminist global health and development leadership; gender and sexual health, equity, and justice; and pleasure, healing, and liberation.
