As many Family Medicine colleagues across the United States complete residency, I find myself looking back to those challenging yet invigorating years. Residency training certainly solidified my clinical skills, from diabetes to pregnancy labor management, but also heightened my interest in social issues. Training in Western North Carolina meant working in a non-Medicaid expansion state where Black babies were three times more likely to die within their first year of life than white babies and where those struggling with opioid addiction were often marginalized. Each day seemingly brought ...

Access to comprehensive primary care has long been a challenge in the United States, and the economic and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will have far reaching implications on our healthcare system. Sixty percent of Americans have at least one chronic condition, and many patients have complex needs that require additional coordination, time and resources than what traditional models of care ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast health inequities into stark relief, though this hasn’t surprised those of us already immersed in the care of homeless persons. Barbara McInnis, a beloved nurse at the Pine Street Inn in 1985 (for whom the Barbara McInnis House for medical respite was named ...

It’s 5:30 am, and while most of the world may still be sleeping, our community comes together, greeting each other with hugs and high fives. We come from all walks of life, running together to get in our morning miles. Our community shows up rain or shine, on the darkest of winter mornings and the brightest of summer days, knowing that by just showing up, we are helping each other put one foot in front of the other, pushing toward a brighter future.

March 12 & 13, 2020. Just three months ago, yet it seems like eons. All my meetings were abruptly canceled so I could attend urgent education team meetings to discuss how to proceed with our medical school curriculum in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many medical schools across the United States, we suspended in-person pre-clerkship lectures and small groups, clinical clerkships and electives and rapidly transitioned to online learning. Faculty, many of whom were digital immigrants (myself included), found themselves forced to use the very technology they had ...

As physicians in the intensive care unit (ICU) at Cambridge Health Alliance, a safety-net hospital in the Boston area, our patients regularly fall victim to the intersection of the social determinants of health and the failures of our dysfunctional healthcare financing system. We frequently treat patients whose health problems have been thrust upon them by structural forces: a Black man spiraling into ketoacidosis because he couldn’t pay for insulin at ...

The Problem While COVID-19 is a novel virus, its devastating impact on public health has shone a spotlight on longstanding failures of our healthcare and social services systems. Thus far in the United States, the virus has claimed over 100,000 lives, dramatically reduced

I heard the commotion from my “captain’s chair,” the seat for the lead clinician at our respiratory clinic. The medical assistants, gloved and masked, hurriedly pushed the wheelchair past my door and into the “emergency” exam room, and I glimpsed a tiny hunched figure in the chair, all dressed in black, with her face grayish brown. “Oxygen saturation 84, we’re calling EMS,” the medical assistant called out, as a nurse walked swiftly into the room to apply oxygen. A clinician jogged over to the personal protective equipment (PPE) room to don her full armor before heading to the patient’s ...

If there is any silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that we now have the opportunity to address ongoing societal failures that have been thrown into stark relief by this crisis. Perhaps chief among them is our complacency toward deeply entrenched racial and socioeconomic health disparities, which have become even more deadly in the face of COVID-19. There is ample evidence in states across the country, including Michigan, Louisiana, and North Carolina, that disproportionately high rates of chronic diseases like hypertension, asthma, and diabetes among people of ...