Regina Conway-Phillips (MSN ’94, PhD ’11) reflects on a career of service
April 29, 2025
Share
When 73-year-old Regina Conway-Phillips (MSN ’94, PhD ’11) was in kindergarten, her teacher told the class to draw pictures showing what they wanted to be when they grew up. With little hesitation, she drew a stick figure wearing a white dress and a nursing cap, a prescient self-portrait of a girl who found her calling at an early age.
“Nursing is what I was born to do,” says Conway-Phillips, an associate professor and department chair in the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, who is retiring this spring after nearly 14 years of service. “I care about people, and I’ve cared about birds that have fallen out of trees. I’ve always just cared about the welfare of other people.”
Conway-Phillips grew up in the Wentworth Gardens housing project on Chicago’s south side, raised by a single mother who worked as a housekeeper and later as a lab technician at the University of Chicago. She had a close relationship with a gregarious neighbor named Sarah Snell.
Snell had a talent for piercing girls’ ears, including those of Conway-Phillips and her sister, Joanne, and she applied a special method for doing so. After warming the end of a needle and placing a cork behind the earlobe, she poked the needle through the skin, drawing back the cork to pull the needle through. Once the skin healed and the hole was established, she would expand the opening by repeating the process, this time with a singed broom straw.
Shortly after Conway-Phillips turned 12, Snell found a lump in her breast. “I had never heard of cancer,” says Conway-Phillips, who experienced the news with the naive wonder of a child. “I didn’t know that cancer existed. I just knew that Ms. Sarah had breast cancer. Then, the next thing I heard was that they had to take her breast off.”
Snell underwent a radical mastectomy, but by then the cancer had progressed a late stage, migrating to the tissue and lymph nodes surrounding her breast. Several years later, it claimed her life.
The sentence that changed her life
More than half a century after learning of Snell’s diagnosis, Conway-Phillips made a wrenching decision that would come to define her career. In summer 2009, as a nursing PhD student at Loyola, she was visiting Washington, DC for an interview with Dr. Claire Hastings, a past president of the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing and then-chief nurse of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical center.
The interview was the centerpiece of an assignment for a nursing leadership and advocacy course co-taught by Dr. Sheila Haas, a former dean of the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, and Dr. Diana Hackbarth (BSN ’68), now a professor emerita. The assignment’s goal, according to Conway-Phillips, was for nursing PhD students to learn more about the work of leaders in their respective fields.
But it didn’t go as planned. During the trip, Conway-Phillips was also busy plugging away at a 30-page research paper and writing a response paper to a Chicago Tribune article on breast cancer screening, a breezy assignment to the side of her research focus on ambulatory care nursing.
Shortly before meeting with Hastings, she read a sentence in the Tribune article that left her speechless. “Even though Black women had fewer incidents of breast cancer,” Conway-Phillips says, paraphrasing from memory, “our mortality rate was three times that of white women.”
According to the article, which cited research from the SEER Cancer Statistics Review, 1975-2006 of the National Cancer Institute, the disparities were not well understood. Even murkier were the reasons some Black women were reticent or unable to get mammograms to screen for breast cancer. “Why isn’t there any research on this?” Conway Phillips wondered. The next place her mind went was to Snell. “She had been diagnosed at a late stage, and then five years later she was dead,” Conway-Phillips says. “She never had a mammogram.”
At first, Conway-Phillips didn’t know what to do. The intervening years had seen her nursing career take shape on the heels of formative events in the Civil Rights movement. She was in the audience when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon to the Progressive Baptist Church in 1965, igniting the Chicago Freedom Movement. A year later, she marched with Dr. King along State Street and participated in the movement’s July 10 rally at Soldier Field. Core to her identity was a belief in the value of equity and social justice, and the outcome disparities in breast cancer screening and survival rates reported in the Tribune deeply troubled her.
Still, she was already two years into her nursing PhD program at Loyola, and shifting focus would not be easy. Moreover, her dissertation, informed by more than a decade of experience as a staff nurse in the pediatric emergency department and trauma units of the University of Chicago Medicine Wyler Children’s Hospital (now the Comer Children’s Hospital), focused on the growing need for ambulatory care nurses in outpatient settings. As a topic, it was light years away from breast cancer research.
In the end, Hastings convinced her to make the leap. “After our interview, I went back to the hotel, took some Advil, cried my eyeballs out, and then I flew back to Chicago and called Dr. Haas and asked if I could come and meet with her,” Conway-Phillips recalls.
Haas agreed to a sit down and eventually signed off on the decision for Conway-Phillips to shelf her original thesis and start anew. “In the end, you have to do what your heart tells you,” Haas told her. “And I think you already know that answer.”
Spirituality and breast cancer screening in Black women
Raised in a Baptist household and deeply spiritual herself, Conway-Phillips suspected spiritual beliefs were an important determinant of screening decisions, particularly among Black women. She became interested in a salutogenic research framework, which focuses on health-seeking behaviors, such as finding social support, rather than pathology. First described in 1979 by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky in his book Health, Stress, and Coping, the framework aligns closely with the Jesuit value of cura personalis, a Latin expression meaning “care for the whole person.”
Conway-Phillips theorized that Black women’s spiritual beliefs—one aspect of their “whole person”—could help overcome fears associated with getting a mammogram. “You have a belief in a higher power, and that higher power wants the best for you: ‘Do your part and this higher power will do its part,’” Conway says.
To test the theory, Conway-Phillips, and her colleague Linda Janusek, now a professor emerita in the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, applied the framework in a 2014 study of breast cancer screening. In it, they surveyed 134 African American women, ages 45-85, about factors influencing their screening decisions, including spirituality, social support, sense of coherence (the view that life is manageable), and health perception. Of those, “only spirituality emerged as a significant predictor of breast cancer screening behavior,” the authors concluded.
Nursing is what I was born to do. I care about people, and I've cared about birds that have fallen out of trees. I've always just cared about the welfare of other people.
— Regina Conway-Phillips, associate professor and department chair in the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing
For nurses delivering health care guidance, the results hold important implications. “When patients are coming in for routine exams, you want to get them to start thinking about getting mammograms at age 40,” Conway-Phillips explains. “And if they’ve had a parent that died from breast cancer, they should start getting screened five years prior to the age that their parent was diagnosed.”
Delivering such recommendations in a supportive, non-judgmental way is believed to be important to their efficacy. But allowing space for spirituality in clinical settings may be just as crucial, according to Conway-Phillips. As one participant in a follow-up breast health study noted, “God is my guiding light though times of tribulation.”
That reservoir of strength may motivate some women to seek screening, or seek screening earlier, and have better chances for survival. According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the average five-year survival rate upon breast cancer diagnosis is 98% for localized diseases, 84% for regional diseases, and 27% for distance-stage disease. For Snell and one of her daughters, Gwen, who also died of breast cancer, receiving a spiritually informed screening recommendation during an office visit, or as part of a church-affiliated program, could have led to a better outcome, Conway-Phillips says.
And helping people—all people, regardless of their belief systems—is what drives her to this day. “To be successful in nursing,” she says, “you have to care.”
Read more stories from the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing.
