Community-Led Research Means Hispanic Nurses Need to Design It

By Tina Loarte-Rodriguez, DNP, RN, CPPS, FADLN

Nurses are the largest part of the U.S. healthcare workforce. In Hispanic communities, they bridge cultures and are the first trusted point of contact. They deliver care in hospitals, community clinics, and schools.

Despite this vital presence, nurses are rarely included in research.

For over twenty years, I have worked as a nurse in patient safety, risk strategy, workforce policy, and national advocacy for Latina nurses. I have translated medical decisions into Spanish, investigated safety events tied to structural inequity, and attended workforce meetings where data conflicted with nurses’ real experiences.

What I have seen, consistently, is that researchers study Hispanic communities without involving the nurses who serve them in any structural way. We need that to change. We need genuine, effective steps that invite nurses serving Hispanic communities to lead and co-design the research that impacts them. Otherwise, nursing insight remains secondary when research agendas are set.

Workforce conditions are health outcomes

Hispanic nurses now make up 7.2% of U.S. registered nurses, according to the 2024 NCSBN National Nursing Workforce Survey, nearly doubling since 2015, yet still well below the 19% Hispanic share of the population.

We study disease rates without asking whether bilingual nurses are available in those communities. We analyze health outcomes without examining burnout in safety-net systems. We fund health innovation, while the workforce delivering that care is understaffed and underrepresented.

The urgency is sharper in 2026: the proposed federal budget would eliminate all Title VIII nursing education programs and HRSA’s Nursing Workforce Diversity grants, programs that have increased diverse nursing enrollment by 20 to 30 percent. Cutting the pipeline while the representation gap remains open is not a budget decision. It is a health equity decision.

A study published in Nursing Outlook in 2024, drawing on survey data from 798 Hispanic nurses across Illinois and New York hospitals, found burnout rates exceeding 55% and severe emotional distress, driven primarily by under-resourced work settings. Hispanic nurses were more likely to contract COVID-19, work in high-exposure roles, and face more patient deaths.

These findings make clear that workforce conditions and public health outcomes are directly connected. To advance a serious health equity research agenda, we must track where bilingual and bicultural nurses practice, examine retention in institutions serving large Hispanic populations, measure the effects of policy changes on Latino nursing enrollment, and identify gaps in culturally responsive clinical training.

Lived experience is data

For years, while working with Latina nurses, I have seen firsthand how administrative data fails to capture the barriers that arise in education, licensure, workplace culture, and access to leadership.

To bridge this gap, we need to build community-narrative advisory boards, train nurses to ethically collect lived-experience data, integrate structured narrative sharing into research methodology, and publish findings in formats communities can actually access.

Addressing underrepresentation in research leadership starts before the doctoral level. Exclusion begins in nursing school with who gets access to research, who is invited into research spaces during training, and who is paid to participate.

Effective change means co-designing health professions curricula with community stakeholders, embedding research training in ADN and BSN programs that serve Hispanic students, creating paid research apprenticeships, and expanding clinical placements in Hispanic-serving communities that include a research component.

Trust requires governance

Hispanic communities have reasons to distrust institutional research. Data has been collected without benefit to the community. Consent forms were inaccessible. Results were published without sharing them with participants.

To rebuild trust, we need to change governance structures by embedding bilingual nurse advocates in IRB processes, establishing transparent data-use agreements with community partners, creating results-driven strategies in both English and Spanish, and using trauma-informed engagement models.

A structure to coordinate this nationally

I propose a National Hispanic Nurse Research Consortium of Hispanic-serving nursing schools, healthcare systems, and community organizations. This group would standardize workforce equity metrics, train nurses in community-based research, and fund nurse-led community studies through micro-grants. It would also pay community advisors for governance and produce annual workforce and health equity reports, including a national repository of quantitative and narrative data.

Investing in minority health outcomes without simultaneously strengthening the workforce delivering that care is an incomplete strategy. Connecting research leadership with frontline nurses is essential, and the Consortium would make that relationship explicit and central.

Supporting this work needs multi-year funding, paid community governance, dedicated nurse-embedded research hubs, and blended capital from philanthropy, health systems, and public funds. Episodic pilot grants are not infrastructure.

Hispanic nurses are already bridging gaps through lived experience and cultural expertise. Now, we need institutions committed to genuine power-sharing for research design and governance. That is the main shift community-led research requires.

The next step is to bring together Hispanic-serving nursing schools, health systems, community organizations, and funders to officially form the Consortium: define shared metrics, align funding, build governance, launch pilot sites, and publish a national equity report in the first year.

I am ready to convene partners to launch the Consortium. If you are interested in supporting or joining this effort through funding, participation, or advocacy, please let me know how you would like to be involved.

Dr. Tina Loarte-Rodriguez is an executive nurse leader, founder, and national voice on health equity, workforce strategy, and system transformation. With more than two decades of clinical and executive experience, she has led large-scale initiatives across healthcare organizations and statewide infrastructure — from designing enterprise-level health equity strategies to driving regulatory readiness and building community-based care models that expand access for underserved populations.

Her core expertise spans high reliability science, quality and safety, regulatory strategy, and organizational transformation. She executes inside complex systems, aligning people, data, and operations to produce measurable results, including multiple HRSA quality awards, reduced workforce turnover, and expanded access through mobile care delivery.

She is the Founder and CEO of Latinas in Nursing, a national leadership, media, and publishing platform that shapes how workforce, identity, and leadership are understood across healthcare. Through books, partnerships, and national speaking, she influences how organizations think about representation, power, and future workforce design.

Dr. Loarte Rodriguez is a Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellow and Executive MBA candidate at Yale School of Management, where she focuses on health equity innovation, capital strategy, and cross-sector collaboration.

She is a board member of the Hispanic Health Council and partners with organizations serious about transforming healthcare systems — not incrementally improving them.