Georgia Sadler, HUP'70, Nu'72
Alumna Georgia Robins Sadler often finds herself at a tipping point, a pivotal time when one decision could change everything. Such was the case early in her career when she found herself managing processes and patient care.
As a night supervisor at Philadelphia General Hospital in 1967, a common crisis was an esophageal bleed. “The patient was spewing blood across the room,” says Dr. Sadler. “You had to move really, really fast to save that patient’s life.” But the tools required to attend to the patient were scattered around the unit, and nurses were wasting precious time collecting them in the crisis moment. Dr. Sadler advocated for a package with all the necessary instruments, but could find no evidence to support her belief that such packages were cost effective. It was the beginning of her understanding of how nursing and business needed to work together better to create evidence-based decisions.
From the University of California at San Diego, where she is associate director for community outreach at the Moores UCSD Cancer Center and clinical professor in the Department of Surgery, Dr. Sadler recalls her clinical foundation: “I fell in love with HUP and with Penn,” she says. “The training I received at HUP was training that would last a lifetime. I had wonderful teachers who really cared, who really wanted us to make a difference. At Penn Nursing, I was absolutely fascinated by public health nursing. It was all about the possibility of changing people’s attitudes and views of the world, of changing the tipping point for them.” Dr. Sadler went on to be the first HUP nurse to earn an MBA from the Wharton School and a Thouron British-American exchange scholarship from Penn. In 1983, she obtained her doctorate in Public Health and Resource Management.
Her interests in health promotion and cancer research came together with her MBA thesis and her subsequent studies as a Thouron Scholar at the University of London. Her doctoral dissertation, on doctor-patient interactions in the field of preventive medicine, was the culmination of these merging interests. “It made research not only something rocket scientists did in the laboratory, but something I could do in the community and in my practice. Suddenly, I had role models of how community-based work could be studied and evaluated and how the published results could influence policy. It could be applied to any field.”
This academic groundwork gave Dr. Sadler the momentum to follow her instincts. “I could see a lot of changes that could make patient care better,” she says. “I would ask, ‘Why are they doing it this way? Why not try doing it that way?’ I can remember a patient at Philadelphia General Hospital who was dying of laryngeal cancer. His last wish was for a cigarette. I thought, ‘If it’s his last wish, that’s fine, but why don’t I get on the front end of this train?’ Preventing such illnesses seemed a far better strategy.”
Her willingness to take untried paths has led to life-saving changes in health promotion.
In his book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” author Malcolm Gladwell pointed to Dr. Sadler’s novel idea of promoting breast cancer awareness in beauty salons catering to African-American women. African-American women have the highest breast cancer mortality rate of any ethnic or racial group. Dr. Sadler enlisted an African-American storyteller to coach the participating stylists on how to share information about breast cancer through stories that were compelling and could be easily retold to others. The stylists had considerable time with their clients, and they had their clients’ trust. “Once you find someone who can manage your hair, you’ll drive a hundred miles to see her,” she said in “The Tipping Point.” “The stylist is your friend. She takes you through your high school graduation, your wedding, your first baby. It’s a long-term relationship. You literally and figuratively let your hair down in a salon.”
Dr. Sadler sought other ways to personalize messages about health promotion. In 1994, San Diego tied with San Francisco for having the state’s highest breast cancer mortality rate for Pan Asian women. Dr. Sadler sought opportunities to remedy that statistic and found the perfect venue in local Asian grocery stores. “These specialized grocers attract Pan Asian women of diverse ages, languages, literacy skills, and levels of acculturation, and I thought, ‘What an amazing place this would be to do an education program,’” says Dr. Sadler. She drew on her MBA education to pitch the idea to stores serving Asian-Pacific Islanders. “This was value-added marketing at its best,” she explains. “This was a way for these grocery stores to show that they were civic-minded, caring businesses serving their own communities. They suddenly had a way to care for their customers better. They were quite literally helping to save customers’ lives.”
Over the past 17 years, Dr. Sadler has attracted hundreds of bilingual, bicultural UCSD students interested in service-learning opportunities in healthcare, enabling her project to expand to more than two dozen Asian grocery stores. “The beauty of working with a community on a public health idea is that you have more opportunity to get it right,” she says. “It’s not me telling you what I think will work in your community; it’s you telling me what you think will work in your community.”
Today in San Diego, Asian-Pacific Islander women are now being diagnosed with early stage breast cancer at the same rate as white women, enabling them to seek treatment sooner and have better survival outcomes. “I think our students have had an important role in making that happen.”
Newly recruited student learners are nearly always nervous. “I tell them that this kind of work is about getting outside of yourself,” says Dr. Sadler. “We are servant leaders. This isn’t about us at all. No one will even remember us tomorrow. What they’ll remember is what we did – together. This is about the people we can help.”