Joshua O’Floinn

Recipient of a Nurses Educational Funds, Inc. Scholarship, Joshua O’Floinn is pursuing a Master of Science degree in Community and Public Health Nursing at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. Joshua received his ADN in 2000 from Butler Community College in El Dorado, KS. In 2015 Joshua earned a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude with a major in nursing and a minor in sociology from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. After completing internships in adult critical care nursing and organ transplant nursing at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, TX, Joshua worked for several years at Saint Paul University Hospital in Dallas before returning to his home state of Vermont. Since 2004, Joshua has worked as a staff nurse in the Surgical, Neurosurgical, and Pediatric Intensive Units at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, VT.

Although Joshua’s professional nursing career has thus far been focused upon interventional critical care, his years of observing and participating in the experiences of his patients prompted a growing frustration at the popular lack of attention to and appreciation for primary prevention and public health initiatives. But it also brought a tremendous appreciation for the threads of causality that link policy to behavior, and subsequently to health. This mix of frustration and appreciation inspired Joshua to engage in social and political advocacy. It also inspired Joshua to continue his education, which will continue beyond the Master’s degree and will include doctoral study into the effects of policy upon behavior and population health. Through this study, Joshua intends to gain proficiency in defining, describing, and intervening upon the social, environmental, and economic factors that influence the behaviors that impact the health of populations.

In addition to his role at the University of Vermont Medical Center, Joshua also works at Worcester State University as a nursing graduate assistant, a biostatistics tutor, and an epidemiology tutor. In his free time, Joshua is an independent citizen lobbyist at the state and federal level, advocating for increased federal support for nursing education and research, and for public health legislation at the state level.