KATIE ALLEN

She began her career as an inpatient nurse in Seattle, Washington, and quickly realized that many of the conditions that led to her patients’ hospitalizations could be prevented by teaching healthier lifestyles. After six years as a nurse, Katie obtained her graduate degree from Georgetown University as a Family Nurse Practitioner and embarked upon a career focused on the upstream battle of teaching people how to prevent disease. Unfortunately most of the uphill battle was not the teaching aspect; it was the limitations of a system designed to keep people ill. When 2020 rolled around in Seattle, WA, the first few cases of COVID in the United States were right down the street from her family practice. It quickly became evident that the healthcare ‘system’ that was supposed to care for human lives did not, in fact, care about those lives as much as it did self-preservation and profit.