Director of Nursing Research and Health Equity Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Janice Phillips, PhD, RN, CENP, FAAN, was selected as by the National Black Nurses Association to receive the NBNA Lifetime Achievers award. Phillips joins four other nurses from across the country who were selected this year.

The NBNA award recognizes exemplary leadership and dedication to the nursing and health care field, practice, academia and service.

"We are so proud to celebrate the 2022 NBNA Lifetime Achievement Awards honorees at the 50th Annual Conference in Chicago this year,” Martha A. Dawson, DNP, RN, FACHE, NBNA president, said. “Their lifetime dedication to the field of nursing, health care, advocacy and humanitarianism fully embodies the mission of NBNA and our 50 years of rich legacy that each one will become a part of in our history.”

Phillips is the director of Nursing Research and Health Equity at RUSH University Medical Center and an associate professor at Rush University College of Nursing. She serves as a systemwide leader in supporting health equity as a shared goal by integrating health equity across Rush System for Health’s education, research and clinical spaces.

“I am grateful to the NBNA presidents who have honored me with this award,” Phillips said. “To the entire cadre of NBNA presidents who I have watched over the years since joining NBNA in 1985, thank you. Your visionary leadership and mastery of the health care system have informed the path I have traveled to become the nurse leader that I am today. I had no inkling there were so many dynamic black nurse leaders until I came to my first NBNA conference.”

Across her career, Phillips has served as a clinician, researcher, educator, political advocate, policy regulator, author and professional influencer in the health care arena. She is the author of more than 150 publications, five edited textbooks and served as the inaugural health policy columnist for the Minority Nurse Magazine. She is the recipient of more than 60 professional and community awards and recognitions including the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Phillips was selected to be featured by Johnson & Johnson in their Starting the Conversation series.

She credits her mentors and supporters for the career she has built serving the diverse communities in Chicago and beyond.

“My journey in nursing began during my senior year in high school when Anna Mae Earles, my Illinois Department of Children and Family Services appointed social worker smiled and said ‘you have potential.’” Phillips said. “She made it her business that I get into college although my hopes of attending college were dim at that time in my life.”