In a career of 38 years as a hospital nurse, Cleo Bell of Durham, North Carolina came to feel increasingly that something was missing. Unlike many nurses, she was glad to be assigned in 1992 to the hospital AIDS unit, where she felt she could make more of a difference than elsewhere in patients lives. I saw to it that she got baptized. When they reached retirement age, Cleo Bell and Susie Surles knew they wanted to do something more but did not know what.
Racial minorities have double the rate of cervical cancer that whites do.
Cleo Bell and Susie Surles will be among those attending the March 4-5 meeting at Duke s Bryan Center which will address the challenge, potentially of crisis proportions, posed by the coming upsurge in the population of older Americans. The number of Americans aged 65 and above is projected to increase from 35 million at present to 78 million in 2050, while the number aged 85 and above rises from 4 million to 18 million and possibly as high as 31 million. The resultant growth in chronic illness and disability, the conference s planners believe, will require a much stronger partnership than exists today between the health-care sector and religious institutions. And parish nurses, they believe, will be essential to building this partnership. The Duke program, inaugurated last summer, reflects the recent growth of a specialty that originated in the 1960s under the guidance of the late Granger Westberg, a Lutheran clergyman in Chicago.