Kenneth R. White Papers

The Kenneth R. White Papers trace Dr. White's professional activities and interests up to 2020, when he resigned his appointment as professor and Associate Dean for Strategic Partnerships and Innovation at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, subsequently accepting the deanship of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions School of Nursing. A range of materials, including correspondence, interviews, publications, speeches, media coverage, and photographs touch on his varied positions in hospital administration, nursing, and academia. Of particular importance are three scrapbooks, retained in page form as Dr. White assembled them. These concern his early career in management with the Mercy Hospital and Health Center, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; his continued work for Mercy International at the Guam Memorial Hospital; and his work as a high school student and undergraduate with the St. Francis Hospital Emergency Department, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This last takes the form of a staff reunion project, assembled for a 25-year anniversary.

Fully one-third of the papers concern Dr. White's work for Mercy International, specifically a three-month consultation project at McDonald Hospital in Koror, Palau, an archipelago nation in the western Pacific; and a multi-year management contract with the Guam Memorial Hospital Authority, on the island of Guam, U.S. territory in Micronesia – these projects occurring in the 1980s to the early-1990s. The Guam project, in particular, yielded correspondence and reports describing the management initiatives undertaken and the difficulties confronted in bringing the hospital to international standards of care and management.

Another cache of materials concern Dr. White's professorship at Virginia Commonwealth University, which he held for over a decade before joining the University of Virginia faculty. Of special significance here are twelve folders containing graduate-student examination/evaluations of courses taught by Dr. White, offering insights on White's teaching methodology and the competencies expected of health administration graduate students.

Also present are five folders of materials relating Dr. White's involvement with the American College of Healthcare Executives, including a small but highly significant collection of items on the establishment and initial steps of the LGBT Forum within that organization. The nearly concurrent foundation of the Rainbow Healthcare Leaders Association is charted in articles of incorporation and in records of U.S. patent and trademark registration, rare examples of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ issues in professional healthcare circles.