Meet Nurse Johnson
Diana Dobbins Johnson is a Registered Nurse at CNMC, serving as the Ambulatory Nurse Care Manager for the My Health GPS program. Nurse Johnson has a Masters in Nursing, specializing in Community and Home Health. Her interest in global health began with two service trips through her church to provide non-medical assistance to orphans in children’s homes in Kenya dna South Africa. Witnessing the intense need for medical care among these communities, Nurse Johnson decided, “I didn’t want to come back until I was doing something substantial that was actually going to have an impact on their health and quality of life.” During these first few trips, Nurse Johnson remembers clearly her surprise at the circumstances she encountered, “there are so many medications available to kids here and kids there are just not receiving them, and their quality of life is dramatically different and because of that so are their lives. That was very impactful for me.”
After joining CNMC as a nurse in special immunology, Nurse Johnson spent eight years with the Peace Corps based in Washington, DC securing medical care for Peace Corps volunteers all over the world. This position involved navigating foreign healthcare systems and coordinating with local providers in Romania, Botswana, Paraguay, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Armenia, and Austria. In this position, Nurse Johnson grew to appreciate the critical importance of local collaboration, and “real partnership, allowing (the local community) to identify what their concerns are, being respectful, and addressing prolonged sustainability.” Impressed by the extreme need she witnessed in the very first communities she visited, Nurse Johnson has, through further global health work, been driven by the “incredible resiliency” of many of the people she has met along the way.