Pirate nurse selected for prestigious White House Fellows program

Pirate nurse selected for prestigious White House Fellows program

Dr. Michael Kennedy, a Pirate acute care nurse practitioner from Morehead City, was announced Oct. 3 as a member of the 2024-25 class of White House Fellows, an incredibly rare and prestigious honor.

Kennedy is a product of eastern North Carolina, especially her formal education and training. She graduated from Lenoir Community College as a registered nurse and earned her bachelor's in nursing from Barton College in Wilson. In 2011 she completed both a master's of science in nursing and the adult nurse practitioner master of science program at ECU before tackling ECU's doctor of nursing practice program and graduating in 2016.

She also completed post-master's certificates at Duke University to practice as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and an adult gerontology acute care nurse practitioner.

"I just kept going back to school in increments. I have always done acute care work within the hospital and after becoming a nurse practitioner I settled into critical care, and that's where I've found myself for the last seven years," said Kennedy, who most recently worked as an acute care nurse practitioner at Carteret Health Care in Morehead City.

One of her mentors at Duke, Dr. Ernest Grant, a former president of the American Nurses Association, reached out to Kennedy during her coursework and suggested she apply for the White House Fellows program because few nurses have been selected in the program's six decades, the most recent in the mid 1990s.

"I did it on a whim because the application process so cool, you meet so many fascinating people along the way that it wasn't time lost," Kennedy said.

The fellows program was established in 1964, and gives outstanding leaders from across the nation an opportunity to work with "senior White House staff, cabinet secretaries and other top-ranking administration officials, and leave the administration equipped to serve as better leaders in their communities."

During the lengthy selection process, Kennedy had to interview with selection committee members over video chat platforms because she was in the United Kingdom working on a rural health initiative as part of one of her post-doctoral programs. After the pool of applicants was whittled down, she traveled to Washington, D.C. for in-person interviews.

After successive rounds of interviews, Kennedy was one of 15 finalists who got phone calls. The day she was told to be on alert for a phone call from a 202 area code - Washington, D.C. - she was called to deal with a patient's emergency.

"As soon as I walked out, I had three missed calls - the most important phone call in my life and I had to shock an arrhythmia," Kennedy said. "I called back, and I got an email some hours after that."

Dr. Michelle Skipper, a clinical professor of nursing and director of the BSN to DNP program, has worked with Kennedy for years, describing her as abundantly compassionate and focused on the patient, always questioning the status quo "when outdated systems and regulations cause patients to receive less than the ideal care they deserve because of where they choose to live."

"As a nurse practitioner, Dr. Kennedy is the perfect fit for this critical role at this critical time in our nation's history as we grapple with social justice in health care," Skipper said. "The quality I admire most about Dr. Kennedy is her unwavering commitment to make change truly happen in rural North Carolina. I am thrilled that a Pirate DNP like Michael has been selected for such a time as this. She exemplifies our motto 'Servire,' to serve, like no other."

The program has necessitated a move to Washington, D.C., which will take Kennedy from her active practice. She believes this set her apart from the members of her cohort.

"With over two decades of nursing experience and a terminal degree, I'm not novice in my profession. When compared to resident physicians, I have been in autonomous practice for 13 years which gives me expertise about clinical and access issues, especially outside of academia," Kennedy said. "If there's a question about care access, they'll defer to me to answer the specifics. It's definitely a level of respect. Even though they're highly qualified resident physicians they give me a level of respect for being a content expert."

An additional reason she believes she was selected for the program is where she was educated and practiced - the South - where rural communities desperately need someone who can help navigate state and federal legislative processes to access health care.

"Everybody's from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Harvard. We do have a physician that attended the University of South Alabama for medical school. I'm the only person educated in the South other than a submarine commander - he's from South Carolina," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said the program is designed to take high achievers in the prime of their careers and expose them to the realities in Washington. For her, that means working on the staff of Admiral Linda L. Fagan, the commandant of the Coast Guard. Her peers are scattered throughout federal government agencies from the departments of State and Commerce to the Social Security Administration and the office of the second gentlemen.

The members of Kennedy's cohort include doctors, an Army Green Beret, a materials scientist and directors of national civil rights groups - a group that Kennedy feels grateful to be part of. But she said she has never felt out of place being a nurse in world of physicians, warfighters and scientists.

"I have not been treated as anything less than a professional. My opinion has been valued as that of a neurosurgeon or a military commander," Kennedy said.

One of the perks of the program is personal interactions with power players in Washington, including the members of the White House Fellows commission and invited guests. They meet regularly and share lunches over Chatham House rules, meaning the conversations are strictly off the record.

"The day to day is quite busy. I call it 'cotillion for overachievers' because it's a lot of thank you notes, a lot of dressing quite well, a lot of Miss Manners. They're long days, really are long days," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said politics hasn't been a huge part of her life, which is fortunate as the program is strictly nonpartisan. Thus far she's been very impressed by the quality of career government employees who "want to do the right thing."

Leaders in Washington are very interested in rural health, Kennedy said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created a department dedicated to rural health and the White House has a rural health subcommittee on its domestic policy council, which Kennedy said is a huge step forward for addressing disparities in health care delivery between zip codes.

"If you are in Cedar Island, North Carolina, you're 80 miles away from an emergency cath lab," she said.

Kennedy said she has planned every step of her life meticulously - schooling, jobs - but for the first time she doesn't know what the next step will be after the fellowship ends because she's completely focused on being present, to take the experience for what it is.

But she isn't wavering from her ultimate goal.

"I want to come back in North Carolina, eastern North Carolina, especially with the recent Medicaid expansion, to be able to impact areas with the worst health care outcomes. I want to use those connections and make real use of my time here to be able to get grant funding for programs at home," Kennedy said.

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