Robert Hart’s Post

It is high time for meaningful #HealthEquity. If you’re interested in accessible, powerful research in this area, I recommend: Follow Uché Blackstock, MD and read her powerful insights in her book Legacy. I gave it to several of my premed students. Also follow Sabia Wade and check out her book Birthing Liberation. Wade’s book opens up understanding the embodied consequences of medical racism and provides real potential solutions. Both Wade and Blackstock discuss the Flexner Report. Look into it, and see the way Black health professionals (and Black health) were structurally, deliberately, and systematically attacked throughout US history. Finally, follow L C De Shay for regular, accessible content on Reproductive Justice, equity, and thought-provoking dialogue.

🌟 Transforming the Future of Healthcare Research shows that Black people have better health outcomes and receive medical care more frequently when treated by Black physicians. Yet, only 7% of medical school graduates and less than 6% of all practicing doctors are Black. This is why the National Medical Association is proud to support efforts that make a real difference. Today, during our Annual Convention, the Greenwood Initiative announced a transformative $600 million commitment to help diversify the medical field and advance health and racial wealth equity. This investment will significantly bolster the endowments of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science, Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, and Morehouse School of Medicine. WATCH HERE: https://bit.ly/46yhN8p In addition to strengthening these institutions, the commitment will support the creation of a new medical school in New Orleans, the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine. This historic move aims to increase the number of Black physicians and improve healthcare outcomes for Black communities nationwide. Join us in celebrating this monumental step towards a more equitable future. The NMA Convention is where groundbreaking initiatives come to life, and this is just one of the many reasons you can't afford to miss it! #NMA2024 #HealthEquity #DiversityInMedicine #HBCUs #GreenwoodInitiative #BlackExcellence #MedicalEducation #NMANYC24

Changing Lives & Addressing Health Equity!

Re-sharing my January The Washington Post op-ed, adapted from my book, “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine”: When I was a little girl, my twin sister, Oni, and I used to visit our mother at work. Her name was Dr. Dale Gloria Blackstock and, in the 1980s and ’90s, she was an attending physician at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. Although I always want to celebrate my mother’s achievements, I would be doing her memory a disservice if I were to portray her story only as one of exceptionalism, of the plucky young Black woman from humble beginnings who through grit and determination rose to success. To truly pay tribute to her, I know I must situate her story within the broader context of the historical barriers that Black people in the United States have faced entering the medical field. Those barriers have been legion. In June 2020, amid a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, I read an article about the Flexner Report that popped up in my Twitter feed. My heart dropped as my eyes scanned the information. I wasn’t prepared for its contents. The Flexner Report was published in 1910 and led to broad standardization of medical schools, with the top school in the country at the time — Johns Hopkins — held up as the example for all others to follow. After the report was published, five of the seven Black medical schools in the United States were forced to close. The article I read in 2020 described a new study estimating that if the majority of Black medical schools had been allowed to remain open after the Flexner Report’s publication, they would have educated roughly 25,000 to 35,000 people. In essence, tens of thousands of future Black physicians had disappeared. I remember sobbing as I absorbed the magnitude of those numbers. The loss of so many Black physicians to the field of medicine and to our communities has been undeniably profound. We know that had those Black medical schools remained open, the health of our communities might be in a different place, most likely better than it is today. Read here: https://lnkd.in/eMzEx-4c Buy LEGACY here: www.ucheblackstock.com

Congrats on the new release which our WANDA founder Tambra Raye Stevenson co-write "The Afterword: ReImagining Black Health" with Melicia Whitt Glover, Olivia Affuso, PhD, FACSM, Jameta Nicole Barlow, and Shiriki Kumanyika on behalf of the Council on Black Health in the new book: "writing Blackgirls' and women's health: implications for research and praxis," which includes other scholarly sisters like Maranda C. Ward, Ed.D, MPH, Chinyere Okafor and Y Falami Tyson-Devoe PhD currently on pre-order and will be available this month! About the book: This field of Black girls’ and women’s health (BGWH) science is both transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. As such, the contributors to this edited collection offer a unique lens to BGWH science, expanding our collective scientific worldviews. The contributing authors draw upon their ontological and epistemological knowledge to formulate pathways and inform methodologies for doing research and praxis to address BGWH. Each contributor draws upon these knowledges and offers the reader a way to better understand how their framing and writing can create change in the health of Black girls and women. We hope you can use this book in your work in the classroom and with communities. Pre-order: https://lnkd.in/ed-SGdMi

The negative social determinants of health disproportionately impact Black Americans and innovative structural interventions are necessary to reduce poor health outcomes. Please join us for the first event of the Science, Health, and Equity Series: Unintended Consequences of Premature Black Death in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum on Tuesday, Apr. 30 at 4 p.m. Dr. Monica R. McLemore, a professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing and interim director for the Manning-Price Spratlan Center for Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE) in Nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing, will connect the dots between preventable maternal morbidity and mortality, infant mortality, and premature Black death. Participants will learn to: 🔸 Articulate the connections between preventable maternal morbidity and mortality, infant mortality, and premature Black death. 🔹 Understand study designs that will be required to provide meaningful data that map assets and identify strengths and protective factors. 🔸 Imagine novel structural interventions that could be operationalized in the present. Register to attend: https://lnkd.in/gG4yGV7x This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, and Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

During Black History Month, join our team in recognizing the healthcare pioneering efforts of leaders like Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumper who was the first Black female physician in the United States. Read more about her experience and other medical professionals in this article. https://bit.ly/2OQWFXh #BlackHistoryMonth #HealthcareInnovation

This group has the audacity to call itself "do no harm" while deeply harming the Black medical community. I consider the enormity of the amount of resources they are putting into stopping such a minute percentage of doctors from being educated. Right now they have filed 44 lawsuits, including a lawsuit to stop the 10 member Montana Board from having just 1 minority member. They claim that having this 1 minority member, has stopped their member from being on the board. They would like to decrease the number of black medical students which is now just 10% of doctors They would like to decrease the number of black physicians which is now just 5% of all physicians. The are supporting bills to stop funding in public schools that are trying to help different communities to learn to see each other as equally valuable and to work harmoniously -This is the real work of DEI initiatives! They are, actively stopping the country from healing and working together. They are doing this, even though diversity, equity and inclusion work has literally been done, often by people from the US, all over the world to help countries heal after all kinds of man made trauma. Why would a group of doctors, the ones who took an oath to first do no harm, try to stop the work of healing this nation? Despite the fact that these methods of healing have been proven effective in other areas of the world, they want to shut it down. "donoharmmedicine" - doing the most harm to medicine and to the country. "donoharm medicine" - refusing to facilitate healing in medicine Edited to say: I deliberately did not include their website in my post. I have no reason to help people to find them.

Investing in community-led and community serving institutions is a vital component of health equity!

So important to see philanthropic funds going to such a crucial and impactful area.