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Duke University School of Nursing’s reputation for its commitment to mitigating social determinants of health (SDOH) continues to garner the school recognition as a top institution for nursing education. The school is ranked #1 for all of its participating Nursing Master’s Programs and Specialties, #2 overall for DNP and #1 for all of its participating Nursing DNP Programs and Specialties, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-24 graduate school rankings released today.  

“It is an honor to be recognized by our peers with these rankings today,” said Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, PhD, MPH, LCSW, RN, ANP-BC, PMHNP-BC, FAAN, dean, Duke School of Nursing, and vice chancellor of nursing affairs, Duke University. “Duke School of Nursing is shifting our mission toward how we can best utilize nurses and nurse-led interventions to reduce health inequities across communities and throughout the country. Our programs and school continue to rank highly because of the excellence of our faculty and academic programs, and our true commitment to health equity, focusing not only on excellence in a clinical setting, but making tangible steps to understand and mitigate harmful social determinants of health.”

In recent years, the school has taken deliberate steps to further its mission to advance health equity, increase access to care, and promote social justice for underserved and underrepresented communities. The school’s Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health (CLAFH) at the Duke University School of Nursing has launched DUSONTrailblazer.com, an online hub to advance a nurse-led model of care to reduce health inequities and mitigate the harmful SDOH. Trailblazer introduces strategies to end health inequities by thinking differently about how to mitigate harmful SDOH. This new resource highlights a novel applied framework designed to support clinicians, policy makers, researchers and educators to meaningfully advance health equity.

Achieving these specific goals requires a concentrated investment in expert faculty. To complement the world-renowned work existing Duke School of Nursing faculty have done to advance health equity, the school’s SDOH Cluster Hire Initiative is bringing in new faculty and leadership with added expertise in addressing social determinants of health. These faculty are already creating science-based, actionable programs of research, scholarship and academic programming designed to reduce health inequities and advance intervention science at the individual, family, community and broader societal levels.

“If efforts to reduce health inequity are to be successful, new thinking is needed to design and implement more effective programs that can mitigate harmful SDOH,” said Ramos. “At the Duke School of Nursing we are educating the next generation of nurses with this new thinking and creating a community of providers, scholars and researchers who share in this vision of health equity.”

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