Black nurse felt unwanted in management, even with advanced degree and experience - PennLive

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EDITOR’S NOTE: On Wednesday, PennLive reported on the historic increase in Black students in medical school, and why that’s important. Today we bring you one in a series of profiles of Black health care professionals in central Pa. who have paved the way and now serve as role models for future doctors and nurses.

At age 23, Virginia Mickens had a master’s degree and a job as a nurse manager at a VA hospital in New York City.

It was the late 1970s. Many Black nurses worked there. They respected her and were glad to see a Black women in her position. But Mickens was one of only two Black managers, and they felt less welcome among their colleagues.

After a few years, her husband’s job as a lawyer took them to Boston. Mickens went to work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She was passed over for promotions, causing her to conclude, “It didn’t matter what kind of degree I had. I was not wanted in that higher position.”

She felt it again after they moved to Harrisburg and she went to work for the Visiting Nurses Association of Central Pennsylvania.

Eventually, she interviewed for a job at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, which she didn’t get. But the interviewer told her of an opening for an adjunct professor at HACC.

Mickens got the job, opening the door to the most rewarding chapter of her career. She eventually became the first Black senior professor of nursing at HACC. She retired in 2020 after 35 years but still teaches there part-time.

She has witnessed positive change and played a role in making it happen.

Kirsten Keys once worked at Harrisburg Hospital where Mickens would oversee her students during clinical training.

“It was so incredibly inspiring to see a Black woman interacting with physicians and educating nurses. You knew by the way she carried herself, the crispness of her nursing uniform, and how others responded to her soft-spoken leadership that she was somebody,” Keys said.

Moreover, Mickens has seen more and more minorities attending nursing school and going on to good jobs and advanced degrees, with some returning to HACC as instructors.

“It is slow change, but it is changing,” said Mickens, 66.

Mickens always found the inspiration and the will to push past obstacles and disappointment.

Much was rooted in her upbringing as one of three children raised by a single mom. Her mom was a licensed practical nurse who left the field and let her license lapse after she had children. But Micken’s father died, and her mother needed to work to support the family. She went back to school so she could work again as an LPN and continued her education to become a registered nurse. Later, while in her 50s, she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

In college in New York City, many of Mickens’ nursing instructors were Black and they became mentors and role models whose words and examples stayed with her, especially after she became a nursing professor.

Moreover, her mother took the family to church, where Mickens built a faith that sustained her when she felt passed over or unwanted.

“I never let it get me down because I knew there was a place for me somewhere,” she said. “I knew if I kept pushing and kept walking, I would walk into what the Lord had for me.”