Doing the work to end health disparities

In March of 2020, Ala Stanford, a board-certified pediatric surgeon, rented a van and began to drive to churches and mosques in Philadelphia, where she would set up a triage hospital, administering tests for the COVID-19 virus in their parking lots. She had been hearing from Black friends that they were having challenges getting a test. "I was getting messages saying, 'Ala, I think I have this COVID, but I went such and such a place and they turned me away, and should I be worried?'" she remembers.

Stanford decided that she could do more good in a van than in the OR and created the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which grew to serve thousands of people, providing tests and, eventually, vaccines. She founded the Dr. Ala Stanford Center for Health Equity in North Philadelphia, was asked by President Biden to serve as regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and joined Penn as a professor of practice in the Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. She holds appointments as director of Community Outreach for research activities in the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and as a research associate in the Annenberg School for Communication.

Stanford's book, "Take Care of Them Like My Own: Faith, Fortitude, and a Surgeon's Fight for Health Justice," not only describes her work during and since the COVID outbreak, but also tells the story of how she became the person who decided to rent that van-the experiences and spirit that made her both a surgeon working within the healthcare system and an innovator who could think creatively and do a different kind of good when she saw that system failing.

Her book begins describing how she was raised in poverty and educated at public schools. "There was some joy, and there were some challenges," she says. "The kids who read this book who live in Philly and were impoverished will definitely relate. And if you lived in Philly and you weren't impoverished, it's going to give you insight into what life is like in ZIP codes and communities that you don't enter."

Stanford herself persevered and competed to become one of a tiny number of Black women pediatric surgeons in the U.S. "It doesn't mean that you don't belong there," she says. "It just may mean that you have to do some things to catch up."

That adversity prepared Stanford for the actions she took during the early days of COVID-19.

She chose the name Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium for the project to send a message, when literature was showing that Black Americans were dying during the pandemic at three times the rate of white Americans. "I wanted them to know that this was for them, for them to say, Okay, it's Black doctors talking about this COVID. Let me go check it out. Because what already existed was not working."

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