Fields’ career in Fulton County’s Health Department spans decades

by Benita Fuzzell
Downa Fields will retire Aug. 31 after 34 years.
Click for more images

While the retirement of longtime Fulton County Health Department nurse Dawna Fields of South Fulton, has been “a long time coming”, having first made her plans known to the Board in May that her final day on the job will be Aug. 31, her career, and her story begins even before she took the position in April 1984.

It was then that a 1979 Nursing School graduate, from University of Tennessee at Martin in 1979, walked into the Health Department on Browder Street in Fulton, after having worked for a few years just across the street at Hillview Hospital.

While Fields may not remember the first visit she made to the health department, no doubt her mother would.

After all, a visit for infant immunizations can strain the nerves of a first time mother.

But Fields’ mother, Geraldine Braswell most likely felt a bit more at ease in the facility.

For she was the Fulton County Health Department nurse in 1958, beginning her tenure there when Fields was just six weeks old.

“I guess I always wanted to be a nurse,” Fields said, seated at the desk she has occupied in Fulton’s county Health Department office in Fulton for over three decades.

She said as a child, in her mind, her mother’s job was primarily to “give shots” and that she did, in addition to, according to her mother’s account, performing 20-30 physicals each day.

“She worked hard, sometimes working two or three jobs. She cooked, canned…..she did it all, in a very strong, business-like way. I was eight years old when my dad died and my sister, Kim (Curtis) was only five. There were not that many mothers who worked outside the home at that time. But mother was able to make a good living for us at the Health Department. My sister and I learned early how to start supper, according to the instructions she had left for us,” Fields recalled.

“Gerri” Braswell will soon be 91. Fields said she plans to use some of her newly found free time spending time with her mother, who lives in Fulton and still keeps up with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, telephoning each of them regularly.

In the span of Fields’ 34-year career with the Health Department, she has witnessed a number of changes and trends.

“Not as many people use the Health Department for immunizations for their children,” she said, adding that today, approximately 60% of children are immunized at the Health Department, compared to near 95% 30 years ago.

She noted when she first joined the Health Department staff, many people utilized the facility who were “down on their luck, experiencing hard times” and visited temporarily until things improved. Also, the uninsured were assisted through the department, however, she noted, with the Affordable Care Act, and the evolvement of the health care system, most people do have some sort of insurance.

“Today there is so much more government involvement and paperwork,” she said.

Fields said she has observed a slight decrease in teenage pregnancies in the area, and one service, W.I.C., a program for women, infants and children which provides nutritional food choices for families is still widely used, most likely more today that three decades ago.

“While more people may be opting out of immunizations for their children, about five or six years ago, we once again were able to be back in schools for immunizations,” she said, recalling a time in the 1960s when it was typical for elementary aged students to line up in the school hallway, as a health department nurse proceeded down the row, like a well-oiled machine, quickly sanitizing, injecting and “band-aiding” each arm, with a few red faces, squeals, and occasional tears from the “patients”.

Fields credits a drop in cervical and breast cancer, to improved awareness of early detection and stressed preventative care. But also, there has appeared to a trend in reported cases of obesity in children, as well as cholesterol issues.

Referring back to her mother’s comparison of how she once would perform dozens of physicals a day, while, far less are performed now in the health department exam rooms, Fields counters with the comparison of “then and now.”

“While mother’s charting would have included a sentence or two on each patient’s reported information, we must chart paragraphs, more than one paragraph, for charting patients,” she said.

Another change will occur at the Fulton County Health Department Sept. 4, when the Fulton facility will be open Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternating Mondays, and the Hickman facility of the Fulton County Health Department will be open on Wednesdays, Fridays and alternating Mondays.

The story will not end, as Fields follows her mother, into the next phase of life in retirement.

Fields and her husband, Tim, have two sons, Tyler and Garrett. And each of them have chosen a career in health care, as a Registered Nurse.

Tyler Fields, 34 is employed at the Dialysis Clinic in Union City, Tenn., and his wife Natasha, is a school nurse. They reside in South Fulton, with their two children.

Garrett Fields, 30, is employed as a Registered Nurse through an agency in Memphis, Tenn. His wife, Chelsey, is an Occupational Therapy Assistant, and they reside in Jackson, Tenn.