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March 29, 2024

VNSNY Executive Breakfast Speaker Shines New Light on Health Disparities

March 15, 2018

Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, speaking on health disparities at VNSNY’s Executive Breakfast on March 6th. Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey is a professor of population health and health equity at the University of Pennsylvania and the former President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

If we want to improve the quality of life for millions of vulnerable Americans, we have to address the social factors blocking their access to quality health care. That was the message of Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the keynote speaker at VNSNY’s Executive Breakfast, hosted by the Development Department on March 6th at the organization’s 70th Street headquarters. The event, designed to highlight transformative issues that impact the health care community, brought together New York-area healthcare providers, foundation representatives, and other members of the health care community.

In her presentation, Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey, a professor of population health and health equity at the University of Pennsylvania and the former President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focused on the need to go beyond general approaches to health care and begin implementing targeted interventions for populations with special needs. These interventions should be delivered on a local level, she said, using coordinated clinical care and population approaches.

“Health is influenced by everything—our income, where we live, the food that’s available to us, education, how we socialize our children, and our family and community structures,” she told the assembled group—explaining that people residing in geographic areas that don’t foster “upward mobility” are effectively trapped in a cycle of poor health. To put that disparity in real terms, she noted the nine-year difference in life expectancy between people living in East Harlem and residents of the Upper West Side.