By Anya Tullman, The Daily Pennsylvanian, October 21, 2019
A student-run conference in the School of Nursing Saturday drew nearly 200 students and community members to talk about incorporating mental health awareness into health care.
The "Reimagining Mental Health" conference featured speakers from across the Philadelphia and Penn communities who discussed harm reductionist and trauma-informed approaches to health care. "Harm reduction" refers to the practice of medical professionals accepting that patients may engage in risky behaviors such as illicit drug use, working to meet patients where they are rather than judging them. "Trauma-informed care" means that health care providers assume that a patient has experienced some type of trauma and act accordingly.
The conference was organized by Paige Martin and Jessie Axsom, two students in Penn's Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Martin and Axsom said they came up with the idea for the conference about a year ago when they realized that harm reduction and trauma-informed care were almost never discussed in the Nursing School curriculum. The two worked for six months to plan the interdisciplinary event that attracted undergraduate and graduate students from many schools at Penn.
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