This Book is About:
Written with the classroom and student experience in mind, “Introduction to Healthcare Professions” is a text to prepare students to the realities of healthcare careers. What sets this text apart from previous is its focus towards helping students to navigate their beginning in healthcare, solidifying for students that everyone has a place in this critical field. After reading through this text, students should:
- Be able to deconstruct the factors that influence healthcare delivery in the U.S
- Be able to select a healthcare career that aligns with their personal values
- Be able to develop strategies for success as they prepare for a career in healthcare
- Be able to recognize their role in healthcare
This Book is For:
“Introduction to Healthcare Professions” aims to act as a guide to community technical college students navigating the healthcare world for the first time. Our approach is meant to provide context to a diverse and dynamic field. We hope that learners will feel empowered to make the leap into a specific path or specialty based on the careers we have outlined. Learners will encounter fundamental skills and knowledge that can be applied broadly across the field and prepare them for their later education and career.
This Book is Unique Because:
“Introduction to Healthcare Professions” is unique because of our commitment to showing all learners that they belong in healthcare. By helping students explore the fundamental competencies of healthcare professionals through the lens of specific fields, we are engaging students in the development of interprofessional understanding to better prepare our practitioners of tomorrow. Within each chapter we give students opportunities to see themselves in the field with our “Day In the Life” sections, as well as snapshots of diseases, skills, and experiences all health professionals will encounter. Written by instructors for both the learners they see every day in the classroom and the ones they hope to see, we hope all students reading will be able to know what they want to achieve through a career in Healthcare.
How We Address Identity:
As authors, designers, and advocates for our learners we want to express our approach towards references to identity. We feel it is necessary to discuss race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age and/or disability, or the intersectionality of these identities and lived experiences, to provide context to our use of identity in this textbook. How we describe and confirm individual identity, much like this text, evolves and the way that we identify ourselves and show respect for an individual’s experience may change.
We understand that individuals within groups often have differing preferences for language use. There is diversity when it comes to expression and individual people or collectives may opt for language that differs from our written language, such as the use of identity-first language, as they attempt to reclaim power from the people and terms that have been used to support institutional and systemic repression. In contrast, during the writing of our text it has been most appropriate to emphasize the individual, focusing on person-first language. This follows one of many best practices outlined by APA’s style guide for Bias-Free Language that has informed our approach to referencing identity within this text. As such, you will see examples of person-first language throughout, such as “they identify as…” or “individuals who identify as…” as a result. We aim to only reference identity when academically warranted and when we do, a single element of an individual’s self-expression does not supersede their entire identity.
In summary, there will always be inherent friction that manifests when attempting to describe something as fluid as identity in a singular moment in time, but we believe that by elevating the individual we can ensure we are not opening our work up to our internal biases and stereotyping the vibrant and unique people that we are writing this textbook for. This statement is a lasting commitment to being part of that evolution and ensuring our text is maintained to continue to support those that interact with our work. If you encounter writing that you feel is misaligned to our mission, please reach out so we can continue this important work.
Image Attribution for Cover Page
Photo by Ömer Yıldız on Unsplash
