Building healthy communities against a backdrop of declining healthcare infrastructure. With Dr. Alisahah Jackson & Dr. Tamara Huff. Episode 139

Dr. Tamara Huff, MD, MBA sits down with Dr. Alisahah Jackson for a discussion about enhancing the health of every community, and they explore the challenges of building healthier communities against a backdrop of declining health infrastructure, particularly in rural communities. They also discuss the reality of the elephant in the room, that racism exists both in terms of attitudes and bias, and in various structural forms, and how building trust is vital to the displacement of bias. 

Dr. Jackson is a proven leader in empowering women to improve their health and the health of their families and communities. She was named the first Chief Community Impact Officer at Atrium Health, where she established strategies for Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health. More recently, she became the System Vice President, Population Health Innovation and Policy, at CommonSpirit Health, and is also CEO of Why Health Matters. Dr. Tamara Huff is a member of Movement is Life Steering Committee & Founder & CEO, Vigeo Orthopedics, LLC.

Excerpts: 

“There are decisions that are being made for us that actually drive health outcomes. Economic, policy and investment decisions. People may live in a food dessert. Or a maternity dessert. We have to start acknowledging that these decisions are happening outside of our own decisions about our health behaviors.” 

“Providers will often label patients as “non-compliant,” and that is a term I encourage everyone to take out of their vocabularies. I simply don’t believe that people wake up in the morning and decide that they want to be unhealthy. Our responsibility as care providers is to identify what the barriers are that people have to achieving great health, and help patients mitigate or eliminate them.”  

“I was a young African American female physician coming into a community that had only seen one other Black female physician, and I really had to build trust. I’m not going to sugar coat it, there were definitely patients who did not want to see me.”

“One of the things I love about Movement is Life is that you are providing resources to help with behavior change. And thank you, Movement is Life, for being an accelerator of these much needed conversations.” 

“What the data tells us, what the research tells us, is that people who have providers who look like them, who can connect with them, tend to have better health outcomes. Movement is Life has been culturally humble enough to say that things like food are very cultural, it’s one of the things that makes a group uniquely different, so their needs are different. Changes in Hispanic culture are going to look different to changes in African American culture, and different from the dominant culture.”