PROVIDENCE — In her new job as Lifespan’s vice president of community health and equity, Carrie Bridges Feliz will confront a big problem: disparate health outcomes and access to health care for underserved populations.
But it’s not, she makes a point of adding, a problem so big we shouldn’t bother tackling it.
“If any group is experiencing disparities and inequities and unequal access to care, it impacts all of us,” Bridges Feliz said. “And we can control that — we can change the direction of the curve on this. So I want folks to feel the urgency to feel connected, but also feel optimistic that there’s stuff we can do.”
Bridges Feliz’s work, in a nutshell, involves bringing health care programs to poor and disadvantaged people in Rhode Island, while trying to expand access to care. That can involve programs for preventing diabetes, improving financial literacy, or even cooking healthy meals affordably. It also means internal work, like pressing for a more diverse workforce and encouraging research teams to get the community involved. Right now they’re looking for local groups to partner with, and to hire people to be community liaisons to figure out what the needs in the community are (the deadline is Monday for these paid positions).
Bridges Feliz, who is from Chicago, has worked at Lifespan since 2015, after stints that took her from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Rhode Island Department of Health and the Providence public schools. Her first job at Lifespan was director of the Lifespan Community Health Institute. She spoke to the Globe last week about her work. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about what your big priorities are going to be in this new role.
I’m excited to go further and faster in the Lifespan system, helping to advance our goals around improving patient outcomes, yes, but also improving the health of the communities we serve. We have to be concerned with both the services that are delivered within our walls, but also the conditions that our patients or prospective patients are experiencing out in the community. For all the work that’s been done in Rhode Island, and in our region, to reduce health disparities, some progress has been made, but frankly, it’s limited. It’s not enough.
What are some of the biggest disparities for health outcomes specific to Rhode Island that could illustrate the problem you’re trying to tackle?
As an example, we still see significant disparities in the rate of screening and the stage at which care is initiated for folks who are experiencing cancers or different chronic conditions. And those disparities are often by race, ethnicity, and also by the level of income or the type of health insurance that a person has, or if they have insurance. With one exception. I’ll point out that as a state, we’ve done a good job at eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in screening rates for breast cancer and cervical cancer and entry into treatment. I give a lot of credit to the Rhode Island Department of Health and its partners. That’s proof that we can bring public health and health care partners together, and really target those populations and then tailor our interventions to meet the needs. We need to do that, though, for colorectal cancer. We need to do it for lung cancer screening and treatment. We need to do it for management of chronic conditions like diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
For the past two years COVID has been the big health story. What are we seeing in terms of equity or lack thereof in outcomes for COVID?
I think what we have seen is not the creation of new challenges. But the elevation and a better understanding of the systemic inequities that already existed, that made the experience of trying to weather COVID more difficult for some populations. So hopefully, we’re coming out of COVID, or at least turning this page. What I think we’ve learned is, trickle down benefits don’t work. You can’t give resources to a handful of tried and true large partners and expect that everyone will benefit from that as a result. Instead, we need to equip and embrace a diversity of community-based partners and organizations and approaches to working with different populations, in order to meet the diverse needs of the populations we’re here to serve.
You’ve been at Lifespan for a while but you also have had this more global view too. How do you think Lifespan is currently doing on all this?
Listen, no one has figured this out completely. I think that the good thing about Lifespan is that we’re past the point of saying, ‘Is there a problem?’ The creation of this new role that I’ve been appointed to, I think, is a recognition that we appreciate we’ve got to do things a little differently. And we need to have some additional perspectives and kind of build out a better team to get this work right. We’re not where we want to be, and frankly, no one is, but we’ve got the elements in place.
Brian Amaral can be reached at brian.amaral@globe.com. Follow him @bamaral44.