Honoring Black Leaders
This month we honor Black leaders whose contributions to health and science have inspired us and made the field of long term care better for everyone.
Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller
The son of formerly enslaved parents, Dr. Fuller was the first African American psychiatrist. He was also the first to publish pathology on Alzheimer’s Disease in English in 1912. He showed how neurological decline due to syphilis was related to Alzheimer’s disease, and he found an increased prevalence of both diseases in Black communities. His work highlights the need for better understanding of how diseases affect different communities in different ways.
Dr. Charles Richard Drew
Dr. Drew is best known for his pioneering work to preserve blood for transfusions during WWII. Without his research, the life-saving blood banks that we know of today would not exist. He also protested the practice of racially segregating Black blood from white blood in the blood banks by resigning his position at the Red Cross in 1942. The Red Cross kept this policy until 1950, the year Dr. Drew died.
Dr. Edith Irby Jones
Not only was Dr. Jones the first Black student to graduate from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences but she was also the first Black intern at the Baylor College of Medicine in 1959. She remained in the mostly segregated south for her whole education and career, continuing to push against racial segregation in the medical field. She was a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and the Association of Black Cardiologists and the first female president of the National Medical Association. She had a successful practice in gerontology and dedicated her life and career to serving under-resourced and poor communities.
Dr. Patricia Era Bath
Dr. Bath was a groundbreaking ophthalmologist whose research in 1968 identified that the prevalence of blindness in Black people was double that of white people and that this prevalence was due to a lack of access to ophthalmic care, not inherent genetic differences. This led her to establish a new discipline: community ophthalmology. Her approach broke barriers by combining principles of public health, community medicine, and clinical ophthalmology to address this disparity in underserved populations. This approach is now common worldwide!
Deke Cateau
Deke Cateau, CEO of A.G. Rhodes Health & Rehab is one of this country’s few Black administrators in long-term care. And he is making a change in our industry today. He serves on the board of directors for both LeadingAge Georgia and The Eden Alternative. His book, Brush Fire: COVID-19 and our Nursing Homes is a call to action that is inspiring change and improving quality in our field.
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JOIN US AT OUR BI-MONTHLY MEET-UPS
Virtual LiveWell Meet Up: Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022 10:00am-10:30am
Let's Talk Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
People of color disproportionately represent staff, caregivers, and residents of long-term and residential care facilities. That’s why it’s so important to have these discussions early and often. It is equally as important for staff as well as management and administrators to be able to support residents and staff in a culturally responsive manner.
We will be joined this week by Nakeshia Knight-Coyle, Equity Strategy Manager for the Oregon Department of Human Services, Aging and People with Disabilities, to help facilitate this important discussion.
We’d love to see your faces and hear your voices at our bi-monthly LiveWell Meet-Ups! We’re building community by creating a forum for staff working in LTCFs to get to know peers, give and get advice, and build camaraderie by sharing challenges and successes. If you have suggestions for future meet up topics, please tell us.
All our best,
— Barbara, Steve, Trisha, Andy, Bowen, and Judy