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Health Equity Leadership Lessons During COVID-19

Home / Blog Posts / Health Equity Leadership Lessons During COVID-19
Free COVID-19 Testing at Casa de Salud

January 13, 2021

By Gabrielle Diekmann

Change, while not easy, is natural and necessary. This is one of the realities of the world we now live in. A world dominated by COVID-19 and accelerating conversations about structural racism in health care and our country broadly. To address needed changes, we need health equity -centered leadership.

Health care providers and Clinical Scholars alumni shared their leadership lessons during the Communities in Partnership: Ensuring Equity in the Time of COVID-19 webinar series. They discussed building bridges with communities in ways that foster engagement and build power together. Specifically, their work is around youth mental health, foster care, oral health, and opioid addictions.

Watch the webinar in full or read some of the lessons shared below:

1. Partner with people who are doing the work

This lesson comes from family physician and Executive Director of Casa de Salud Anjali Taneja. It is important to partner with, learn from, and build with those already working in the focus area. Find ways to learn from those in the community you seek to help. Understand your own history and how it relates to assumptions and realities of health care delivery systems within the community.

In response to the opioid epidemic, Casa de Salud partnered with Centro Sávila to deliver culturally relevant healing and harm reduction services. Together with the community, they reimagined how they care for patients. They shifted the focus from individuals and shame to collective healing and civic engagement.

Health equity free COVID-19 testing at Casa de Salud
Free COVID-19 testing / pruebas gratuitas para COVID-19 at Casa de Salud in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Clinical Scholars equips health care providers with leadership tools centered in equity, diversity, and inclusion to transform their careers and the health of their communities. Meaningful community engagement and collaboration and partnerships are just a few of the program’s health equity leadership competencies.

“I’ve heard it said that this work [health equity] happens at the speed of TRUST.”

Giselle Corbie-Smith, MD, MSc

2. Listen

Pediatrician Joyce Javier stresses the importance of really listening. It might sound simple, but it can be hard for leaders who already have a vision or ideas for how to help. First listen to the community’s input in defining the problem and the solution. Then there will be buy-in.

Listening by Dr. Javier’s interdisciplinary team is behind the success of the Filipino Family Health Initiative. By listening to families’ experiences with mental health, they incorporated the core Filipino value kapwa (togetherness or shared sense of identity) into an educational program. Through strengthening the parent-child relationship, the program helps prevent suicide and other emotional and behavioral issues among Filipino youth. Now the program has expanded to all parts of California.

Health equity leadership by Joyce Javier for NBCLX Livestream
Joyce Javier (right) interviewed by NBCLX’s Jobeth Devera about women’s mental health during Filipino History Month

3. Be transparent

This lesson comes from Charles Moore, Chief ENT Specialist at Grady Health, Director of Emory University’s Urban Health Initiative, and Founder of the HEALing Community Center. Dr. Moore recommends being transparent as you progress through your work by:

  • Being realistic about what you can do and what you don’t know if you can do
  • Working together with your team, partners and the community to see what can be created
  • Over-communicating in order to ensure everyone is included

Dr. Moore partnered with a dentist and nurse practitioner to launch OH I CAN. Their efforts included a user-friendly mobile app to help address the vast oral health disparities that exist for low income and minority families in Atlanta.

Health equity leadership by Charles Moore with HEALing Community Center mobile clinic
Charles Moore with the HEALing Community Center’s new mobile clinic providing easy access to care in the Atlanta area

4. Just get started

Don’t stall says social worker and founder of underdogDREAMS Derrick Stephens. Don’t become so bogged down with everything that you don’t ever start in the first place. Things will begin to fall into place once you start. You can accomplish so much even in the time you might not have all the funding or plans required yet.

Derrick’s team including another social worker, physician, psychologist, and psychiatrist started helping those in the foster system. The team has since shown with the right engagement and interventions, there are significant improvements in long-term quality of life outcomes for foster youth and families.

Health equity leadership by Derrick Stephens with underdogDREAMS foster youth
Derrick Stephens with underdogDREAMS foster youth

What health equity leadership lessons do you have to share?

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Blog Related Information

Projects

  • Strong Roots / Raices Fuertes: Innovative and Community-Based Approach to Addictions
  • Filipino Family Health Initiative: Prevention of Behavioral Health Disparities in an Immigrant Community
  • OH-I-CAN: Oral Health in Communities and Neighborhoods
  • underdog DREAMS: Improving Long-Term Quality of Life Outcomes for Foster Youth and Families

Fellows

  • Joyce Javier, MD, MPH, MS
  • Charles Moore, MD
  • Derrick Stephens, LCSW
  • Anjali Taneja, MD, MPH

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Photos © 2016 Flynn Larsen, Courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation