Can A 32-Year-Old Doctor Cure Baltimore’s Ills?
Neighborhoods in Baltimore are still struggling to recover from the riots that broke out following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury to his spine while in police custody. In the aftermath of the unrest, we here at NPR spent many hours trying to understand the raw anger on display. We looked at police brutality, economic disparities and housing segregation in Baltimore.
Our conversations eventually led us to Leana Wen.
Wen, a 32-year old emergency physician, had become Baltimore’s health commissioner just a few months earlier. With Baltimore leading the news day after day, she seized the moment to get her message out, including on this blog, where she has been an essayist.
She wrote about the health department’s immediate response to the unrest, making sure hospitals were protected and that staff and patients could get to them, and that ensuring seniors could still get prescriptions when their pharmacies were looted and burned.
After calm was restored, she turned her focus to the city’s more chronic issues. For years, she argued, Baltimore has been traumatized by poverty, violence and drug abuse, problems that can be treated through public health.
“We have to make the case that actually, everything comes back to health,” she told us in May. “My hope is that we can really make Baltimore into a model for the rest of the country to follow when it comes to treating the core roots of our problems.”
(More from Shots: Health News from NPR)
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário