As a child growing up in pre-Independence Guyana, Patricia Rodney knew she wanted to see the world. Although her first job out of high school was as a teacher, she soon realised that this profession wouldn’t allow her to follow her dreams of travelling. And so, when she came across a recruitment drive for student nurses in England, she leapt at the opportunity. It was in London that she would observe the social inequality that was being faced in many parts of the world, and where she began to cultivate her resolute sense of justice.
“At that time, in London, I not only saw the racism in general, but I saw how Black people were treated within the healthcare system,” says Dr Rodney.
She resolved to try and change the healthcare sector, and has spent much of her life working towards more equitable conditions for marginalised communities both working in and being served by healthcare systems across the Caribbean, Africa, and North America.
Her next port of call was Tanzania. Having married fellow activist and scholar Walter Rodney in 1965, she and her firstborn, Shaka, would join him the following year as he relocated for his appointment as lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam. Here, her experience in healthcare would be much needed.
“When we got to Tanzania, there was a shortage of public health nurses,” says Dr Rodney.
She got a position with the city council’s school nursing programme, where she was engaging mostly with schools and the issues facing the children of the community.
“I also saw during that period that the kids needed more than just treating a sore, or something. A lot of them were malnourished... At that time, there wasn’t any connection between what we were doing in the schools, and what was happening in the home.”
It was a light bulb moment for her, seeing the limitations of the healthcare system working within a silo, disconnected from the rest of the lives of the people they were serving.
With her husband now taking up a post at his alma mater, The UWI’s Mona campus, the family made their way back to Jamaica for a brief stint.
“I started working immediately at The UWI hospital, and I worked within the prenatal ward,” says Dr Rodney. Again, her instinct for engaging more deeply with her patients led her to see the wider social problems facing these mothers outside of the hospital space.
“I saw where nursing was confined to a hospital setting, but then you have all these social problems that people face when they come into an institution… nursing didn’t fill some of those gaps that I was seeing.”
She decided to begin studying social sciences at The UWI, but her time there was short-lived. Her husband’s work, engaging with inequality on the political front, led to the Jamaican government banning him from the country and the student-led demonstrations known as the "Rodney riots".
After another period in Tanzania, where she was in charge of the Vaccination Centre, focusing on early childhood vaccinations, the family now of five (with the younger two children, Kanini and Asha, being born in Tanzania), would finally return to Guyana. With no jobs hiring in healthcare, Dr Rodney began working in childcare instead, bringing her experience to foster a more well-rounded early childhood education for the children in her care by also engaging with parents and childcare staff on a more holistic level. She completed her diploma in social work at the University of Guyana, and then went on to spend a year in Mona completing her undergraduate degree at The UWI’s Mona campus.
She was optimistic that she would soon find employment in the field of healthcare, having widened her pool of skills. But the hostile political climate against her husband’s work left them both unemployed for eight months, with any opportunities being blocked from higher up the chain. When a colleague received a grant to hire with a budget external to the university in 1980, Dr Rodney was hired as his research associate, and it seemed the employment embargo was finally over.
“He hired me in May,” says Dr Rodney. “In less than one month, in June, my husband was assassinated.”
Their children, at the time, were 14, 11, and almost 9 years old. Their lives would never be the same. For Dr Rodney, she had no choice but to keep moving. Relocating to Barbados, she found that her degree in social work had become more vital to their survival than ever. With no family in Barbados, the inconsistent hours required for a nursing career would not have allowed her to be as present for her children. She held three jobs during her time in Barbados, continuing her work and doing what she refers to as “consciousness raising” – a term referring to engaging with communities to help increase awareness of social issues that was popularised in the 1960s.
For the next decade, she continued her work tirelessly, but began feeling that a change was needed. “I felt that I had to leave the Caribbean,” she says. “In the Caribbean, I was always seen as Rodney’s wife. I was never seen as a person, or for what I was doing. I needed space.”
In 1989, she joined her mother and sisters in Canada, where she completed her PhD in Sociology with a minor in Adult Education from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her thesis drew from her work in Barbados, and then in Grenada, becoming published in 1998 under the title “The Caribbean State Health Care and Women: An Analysis of Barbados and Grenada”. In it, she analysed the healthcare policies in socialist Grenada during the 1979-1983 period with those in capitalist Barbados.
She eventually became a research fellow at the Canadian Advisory Board on the Status of Women, as well as taking on the role of the Program Coordinator of the International Task Force on Literacy at the International Council for Adult Education. In 1995, she joined the faculty at Morehouse School of Medicine, where she remained for another 15 years, becoming the Programme Director for the Department of Community Health and Preventative Medicine, and then the Inaugural Assistant Dean for Public Health Education.
Alongside her own wide-spanning career, Dr Rodney established the Walter Rodney Foundation in 2006, to honour her husband’s legacy and help continue his work. In 2021, after intense lobbying headed by Dr Rodney, the Government of Guyana was found responsible for Walter Rodney’s death by a Commission of Inquiry.
In 2011, Dr Rodney also established Partners in Health, Education and Development, an international organisation to advocate for more equitable healthcare with a focus on Africa. On October 24, 2024, she was conferred with the Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by The UWI St Augustine campus. Her work continues to inspire a new generation of activists in all fields, to look beyond the silos of their own spaces and see the wider stories of people’s lives that can help create more equitable and just communities for all.