Allan Appel Photo
Satcher with an admirer, Yoo Jin Chang, an Americorps/VISTA staffer in early childhood at the mayor’s office.
Nursing student Anayah Sangodele-Ayoka walked two miles Thursday morning — and not only to get in her daily exercise.
She had a breast-feeding policy question to ask of former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher who was delivering a keynote lecture on why poor and minority populations, including those in New Haven, continue to have more diabetes, obesity, and other health problems than the national average.
People can get healthy by exercising and eating well. But government has to help with good policy, said Satcher, who served as the country’s 16th chief medical officer between 1998 and 2002.
For example: A parent can help a kid avoid eating too much dessert. But he may also not want to leave his front porch to exercise if he doesn’t feel safe in the neighborhood due to broader social factors.
Sangodele-Ayoka (pictured) asked Satcher how the country can get more black women to breast-feed their babies. His answer: Encourage universities and corporations to institute policies making that easier to do.
The back and forth occurred at an all-day “Health Equity Summit” convened at Yale Medical School’s Harkness Memorial Auditorium.
The Thursday event, sponsored by the school, the city, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, and the Connecticut Health Foundation, drew more than 100 listeners, mostly health professionals, including several like the city’s community services administrator, Martha Okafor.
Community Foundation President and CEO Will Ginsbergdescribing Satcher, the first surgeon general to issue a national report on mental health among other pressing subjects, as “one of the most prominent voices on racial and ethnic disparities in health.”
Ginsberg said that New Haven has already made a lot progress through programs like New Haven Healthy Start, but challenges remain. He said persistent large-scale disparities in health outcomes are “deeply troubling .”
Although Satcher did not address issues specific to New Haven, he did send out a wake-up call for all of us to take neither our physical nor our mental health for granted.
He defined “health equity,” as opposed to health equality, as access to equal opportunity — not just to providers but to good food, exercise, and emotional health.
To achieve these aims, certain groups require more resources, he said, and illustrated with this, among other of his PowerPoint images.
“Are we as a nation acting as if health equity matters?” he asked rhetorically.
He provided an answer in part in response to a question from the audience in the post-talk Q & A. While praising the Affordable Care Act, he said that in the run-up to it, among the committee recommendations was $15 million for promoting neighbors safer for kids to exercise. Lawmakers cut that out of the ultimate bill, Satcher recalled.
The reason? They considered the problem of a kid on a porch and his or her not wanting to go out to play the child’s and his family’s responsibility, not the government’s for helping to provide supports to make that happen, he said,
The mayor Okafor.
Speaking at the event, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp called Satcher inspirational and said she hoped the summit day would be one for “brainstorming.”
“We so often think of health care as access to providers and doctors, whereas so much has to do with, for example the environmental [factors], like second-hand smoke. Sometimes it’s like [gettting the word out] to get flu shots,” Harp said.
Harp characterized New Haven’s work as “being really good at bits and pieces. I’d like to see better, more effective collaboration among agencies.”