What can be done to close health gap in South Florida’s Black communities?
When Melida Akiti’s son-in-law was suffering from severe abdominal pain, he trudged over to urgent care. He checked in and waited, only to be discharged with nothing but a Tylenol.
The experience is among the reason he — and many other people of color — hate hospital visits.
At midnight, he called Akiti, who is a vice president at Memorial Healthcare System, in excruciating pain. She took him to the same urgent care center and demanded to know why the staff ignored his ailments.
Then the matter was taken seriously. So seriously that he was hospitalized for four days. He could have died without treatment.
For Akiti, her son-inlaw’s experience reaffirmed the need for Black health to avoid Black death.
Health professionals, experts and officials gathered Thursday morning for a Black Health Summit at Florida Memorial University to focus on health disparities related to maternal health, violence and climate change.
As a South Florida primary care physician of 35 years, Dr. Cheryl Holder has seen the effects of a health gap on the poorest and most vulnerable populations. People of color, the FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine associate dean said, are among the most affected.
Health disparities are a reality in the community, and they can be traced back to slavery, said Dr. Nelson Adams, the chair of the Sunshine Health Board of Directors.
“Some of us are so segregated and isolated in our socioeconomic brackets
that we really don’t recognize how others are being impacted by the things that we say and the things that we do,” Adams said.
People need to look at Black health for the health of everyone in the community, said Dr. O’Neil Pyke, chief medical officer of Jackson North Medical Center. That includes social factors such as economic stability, food security and physical environment.
Half of a patient’s quality of health is tied to their social situation, Pyke said. So it comes down to more than treatment and medicine.
“We have to see the person beyond that patient,” he said.
Local health coalitions and programs are essential to curb health disparities, said Dr. Armen Henderson, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Miami.
Henderson founded the Dade County Street Response, an organization that meets patients in the community to provide healthcare. He also runs a free urgent care in Liberty City, which has case managers who help people with getting access to affordable housing, food stamps and IDs.
“Medical professionals, in general, need to step out of the doors of the hospital,” he said.
Even with inadequate funding, community health groups like Henderson’s are a lifeline in the community, state Sen. Rosalind Osgood of Tamarac said. They have already earned the trust that medical professionals at hospitals often do not have.
Many people still reference the Tuskegee experiment, a 1932-1972 study that observed the effects of syphilis when untreated in Black men, Osgood said. The men were not properly informed about the study nor were they given the option to be treated for the disease.
Another issue is that people can’t be expected to trust a doctor when they feel like they’re being judged, Osgood said.
She said she gets treated differently when she goes to a doctor’s office in a dress compared to when she wears a hoodie and sneakers.
That’s among the reason communities of color need professionals who look like them, Pyke said.
“There is a real distinction when you see someone who speaks your language, who is from your cultural background.”