Becker's Hospital Review

47 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP Meet 6 Black female physicians, health advocates at the helm of the COVID-19 fight By Kelly Gooch A CNN article highlights six Black women on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic battle. e six physicians and health advocates, as reported March 2: 1. Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD. Dr. Nunez Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., serves as chair of President Joe Biden's COVID-19 health equity task force. e task force will make recommendations to the president re- lated to equitable allocation of pandemic re- sources and relief funds. It will also provide recommendations about outreach to under- served and minority populations, as well as other response and recovery efforts. During an interview published Feb. 22 by NBC News, she said her approach to addressing dispari- ties includes disrupting the predictability of which communities will be hit hardest. 2. Ala Stanford, MD. Dr. Stanford, a pediat- ric surgeon, is founder of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, an initiative of It Takes Philly, a nonprofit Philadelphia youth organization. e consortium focuses on ed- ucation and advocacy for Black residents in communities hit hard by COVID-19. is in- cludes a mobile COVID-19 testing and vacci- nation operation. Dr. Stanford told CNN that more than 24,000 people have been tested and more than 16,000 people have been vac- cinated through the consortium's efforts. 3. Kizzmekia Corbett, PhD. Dr. Corbett is a research fellow and the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines and Immuno- pathogenesis team at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center. She is a viral immunologist and played a key role in the development of the Moderna shot. She told CNN in December: "It became clear to me that for every single thing that I've read in a textbook about science, someone had to discover that. And I wanted to be one of those people that for a line in a textbook, which hopefully mRNA-1273 [the Moderna vaccine] will be at some point, there's some- one who discovered that thing and helped to drive that theory." 4. Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD. Dr. Rice is president and dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, a historically Black medical school in Atlanta. CommonSpirit Health in Chica- go and Morehouse School of Medicine an- nounced in December a partnership for a 10- year, $100 million partnership to develop and train more Black physicians. Dr. Rice has also vaccinated Atlanta residents during the pan- demic through an operation at Morehouse, CNN reported. She was vaccinated on CNN in December to promote the importance of vac- cination, specifically to the Black community. 5. Michelle Nichols, MD. Dr. Nichols, a family medicine physician, is associate dean of Morehouse School of Medicine. She has worked with Dr. Montgomery Rice to vacci- nate Atlanta residents during the pandemic and has expressed her passion for health eq- uity, according to CNN. 6. Debra Fraser-Howze. Ms. Fraser-How- ze is founder of the National Black Lead- ership Commission on AIDS. During the pandemic, she has partnered with Black pastors to launch Choose Healthy Life, ac- cording to CNN. Choose Healthy Life aims to address the pandemic in the Black com- munity on COVID-19 testing, care and contact tracing. n More women are becoming physicians and 4 other workforce insights By Kelly Gooch T he U.S. physician workforce has gained women and older members since 2007, according to a data report re- leased by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The report, released Feb. 2, is based on 2019 data from the American Medical Association, U.S. Census Bureau and GME Track, a resident database and tracking system. Five insights on the nation's physician workforce from the report: 1. Women represented 28.3 percent of the physician workforce in 2007 compared to 36.3 percent in 2019. 2. Specialties with the highest percentages of women in 2019 were pediatrics (64.3 percent) and obstetrics and gyne- cology (58.9 percent). 3. Nearly 45 percent of active physicians were age 55 or older in 2019, up from 44.1 percent in 2017 and 37.6 percent in 2007. 4. The percentage of active physicians in sports medicine grew by 55.3 percent, from 1,865 to 2,897, between 2014 and 2019. 5. Specialties with the largest numbers of first-year Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education residents and fellows in 2019 were internal medicine (10,379), family medicine/general practice (4,456), and pediatrics (2,993). n

• Cover