Elsie Taveras. Courtesy photo.
Elsie Taveras, the inaugural chief community health and health equity officer for Mass General Brigham, will deliver the keynote address at Boston College School of Social Work’s annual Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Lecture and Distinguished Alumni Awards Celebration on Monday, February 6.
Taveras said her talk will focus on MGB’s multi-million-dollar initiative to combat the impact that racism has on patients, staff, and the wider community.
The largest health system in Massachusetts launched “United Against Racism” in 2020 in response to the killing of George Floyd, aiming to eliminate disparities in patient care, create workforce equity, and improve community health.
“We’ve made a huge commitment to really deliberately think about how we can make a difference, how we can really influence the area of racism and health inequities with as much rigor and as much commitment as we put towards medical research, towards innovation, and towards clinical services,” said Taveras, who also works as a pediatrician at Mass General Hospital. “It’s important to be united against racism because it takes all of us. Healthcare affects everyone, and when we as a system tackle racism in healthcare, it can have a big impact.”
As part of its United Against Racism initiative, MGB formed a partnership with BCSSW in 2021 to improve the mental health of Latinx communities in Massachusetts.
Last November, the health system gave the Latinx Leadership Initiative a $600,000 grant to develop the workforce of bilingual and bicultural social workers in the state. Four LLI students have already completed the program, which provides stipends and professional development to fellows as they work in community health settings that predominantly serve Latinx clients. Going forward, the LLI and MGB will select at least 10 fellows each academic year.
Taveras said MGB vetted dozens of programs for the grant before giving it to the LLI, a cohort-based program that prepares social workers to accompany Latinx communities in developing sustainable solutions to complex problems in health, education, housing, and other areas. Marylou Sudders, the outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services for Massachusetts, introduced the health system to the initiative, and Taveras, along with Joy Rosen, MGB’s vice president for systems behavioral and mental health, were particularly impressed by the leadership of Founding Director Rocío Calvo.
“We’re always looking to collaborate with organizations that take a very similar approach to ours—programs that are proven effective, programs that are very careful about engaging their communities in the design of their initiatives,” said Taveras. “The Latinx Leadership Initiative does all of that, checks all of those boxes. It was just a perfect fit. We are facing a critical shortage in mental health access across Massachusetts, and the program was exactly what we were looking to fund to increase the pipeline of mental health providers.”
“We’re always looking to collaborate with organizations that take a very similar approach to ours—programs that are proven effective, programs that are very careful about engaging their communities in the design of their initiatives. The Latinx Leadership Initiative does all of that, checks all of those boxes. It was just a perfect fit.”
Taveras set her sights on improving community health long before she stepped into her new role at Mass General Brigham in May 2021. In the 1990s, while working as a resident at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital, she noticed that most of her patients had a combination of asthma, obesity, and behavioral health problems. Many of the children she saw came from low-income households and belonged to ethnic minority groups, and she wanted to figure out why such a high percentage of them experienced this triad of maladies.
“I was very interested in spending my research career understanding why I was seeing that pattern in the children that I cared for in my clinic,” she said. “Why was I seeing such a high prevalence of these chronic diseases, and why was there such a disproportionate burden of those diseases in my patient population?”
Taveras has spent the past 20 years studying obesity in women and children and developing interventions to prevent chronic diseases in underserved populations. Her research, which has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Diabetes Association, has influenced the development of national programs to improve health outcomes and eliminate inequities for some of the most vulnerable people in the United States.
As a result of her accomplishments, Taveras has won major awards and been selected top leadership positions at prestigious organizations. In 2016, she received the Public Health Leadership in Medicine Award from the Massachusetts Association of Public Health for working to improve healthcare in community-based settings. In 2017, she was named executive director of Mass General Hospital’s Kraft Center for Community Health, which is devoted to expanding access to high quality, cost effective healthcare for underserved patients, families, and communities. And in 2018, she was named the Conrad Taff Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
Taveras drew parallels between her research career and leadership roles. “I’ve always tried to ensure that my own research is solutions-oriented and working towards helping the underserved,” said Taveras, who earned a doctor of medicine from the New York University School of Medicine in 1997. “Now I spend much of my time in the design and implementation and scaling of programs that are proven effective to improve the lives of underserved populations.”
She looks forward to sharing MGB’s United Against Racism initiative with the BCSSW community and hopes that her talk will lead to even more partnerships with the school. “I’m excited to share how the ability to do this in partnership can catalyze and scale the important work that we are trying to do,” said Taveras, who will participate in a one-on-one discussion with Sudders following her lecture. “How can we look for other best practices that we might be able to work on together to advance health equity and improve health outcomes?”
The Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Lecture and Distinguished Alumni Awards Celebration will be delivered in a hybrid format. The entire event, including an in-person reception, will take place in 100 Gasson Hall from 6-8:30 p.m. The keynote address and award ceremony will be available to watch on Zoom from 7-8:30 p.m. RSVP by January 23.