- My name is Dr.

Sylvia Owusu-Ansah.

I am EMS Medical Director at UPMC, Children's Hospital Pittsburgh.

I am also an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine.

- Okay, I'm gonna stop you.

- All right.

You're gonna stop me?

- Because I've got this laundry list.

- Okay.

- This is all the things that you do.

Not to embarrass you, but you're associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine.

You're the EMS Medical Director at Children's Hospital.

You're the Associate Vice Chair of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

You're a screenwriter with a well reviewed film on the festival circuit.

You're an ardent advocate for education and CPR training in public schools.

On the glam side, you're a medical advisor for the HBO hit series, the Pitt.

You're a wife, you're a mom, and a PTA member.

My question is, when does napping take place?

- That is a, that is a very good question.

I do take time for myself.

I'm not a big napper, but I do believe in taking a few minutes in between spaces just for myself.

Because I am a bonafide introvert.

I know many people don't think that, 'cause I'm out and about and I, I do networking well, but I do take those few minutes and evidence-based medicine has shown that that goes a long way of being productive and just taking those little snapshots of time for yourself.

- I wanna start like locally, like what was it that brought you to Pittsburgh?

- I'm a pediatric emergency medicine physician.

So in essence, I'm a pediatrician.

I am a doctor dedicated to taking care of kids, but I found the world of taking care of kids outside of the hospital in the pre-hospital realm, meaning when you call 9 1 1 and kids have to come via ambulance or EMS has to come to their homes and discover what is it, what it is that's making them sick.

I was very intrigued by that.

And what I noticed during my training in the DC Baltimore area is there was a big disconnect between EMS and, and the hospital.

And you know, I think when you're taking care of a patient, you're taking care of 'em on a continuum and you need to respect the space in which they're taking care of it.

And this disconnect really bothered me and I I wanted to do something different about it In the pediatric space, interestingly enough, for EMS, a majority of people who lead in EMS are otherwise known as EMS medical directors.

Over 95% of them are adult emergency medicine trained.

And so I was specializing in this particular niche that the country wasn't really ready for or aware of.

There are only like a handful of us in the country that did it, and Pittsburgh understood it.

And hence in, in all the places that I applied to and, you know, tried to advance my career, Pittsburgh got it right away.

This is what I wanted to do, this is how I wanted to lead and this is how I wanted to take care of my community.

So here we are almost a decade later.

- If you had to make a list of like the 10 most trusted institutions in Pittsburgh Children's Hospital would definitely be on the list.

I mean, they've taken care of scores of children in their existence.

So it's kind of perfect that that's the niche where you found yourself.

- No, a hundred percent.

And we hear that every day, you know, over the past eight to nine years that I've been here, I continue to hear that.

And that Children's saved my life.

Children's saved my child's life, or my niece's life, or my nephew's life, or without Children's, we wouldn't be here or my son wouldn't be here, or my daughter.

And so that is very true and I'm very honored to work there in that space for that reason.

- But in, in the rigors of what you do in the ER, pediatric ER to be exact, it's like, it's physical, it's mental, it's emotional, it's all of these things working together at the same time.

Like as a professional, how important is it to find the equilibrium to do what you do?

- It is very important or else it spills over and you can't provide quality care and you can't be there for your family either.

What I was recognizing in Pittsburgh, you know, pediatric emergency medicine, as you noted, can be very hard profession.

We have to call time of death for babies.

We have to give new diagnoses of cancer in children or diabetes.

And it's life changing and it's heart wrenching.

And you're meeting parents and children at their most vulnerable spaces.

And so that does take a toll mentally and physically.

It's, it's almost inhumane to do without taking a pause for your patients and taking a pause for yourself.

And so learning to do that, as I go from room to room to take that pause to take to maybe we, we actually debrief now we do a moment of silence if a child passes away, we recognize the child's life, recognize the work that was done in that space to save the child's life, to attempt to save the child's life.

And then we talk amongst ourselves to see how we're doing mentally.

And so I've kind of taken that on as a personal kind of adage to do for myself, which I never used to do before.

Now I will sit in the car and so, you know, meditate or I'm a woman of faith and I'll pray or talk to God before I go home.

Because I've noticed that would spill over into the home space, which didn't help my daughters or my husband one bit right?

Or myself.

And so you have to take the time to survive in this healthcare sphere and, and to provide the best care for patients, which is why we're there.

- That journey, that medical journey was what also brought you to the short film, the narrative piece that's called "In Good Hands", which also relates some of the good but also the less positive aspects of your work.

Tell us a little bit about "In Good Hands" and how that came about.

- Yeah, so "In Good Hands" is a short film that features my work life in a 12 minute short.

It, it features many aspects of my career over time in the last few minutes of a shift.

How this came about is during the COVID Pandemic, I was one of the first people in the country really to receive the COVID vaccine.

I was the first Black person and first physician in the state of Pennsylvania.

And that gained a lot of media notoriety.

And I said specifically, to the Associated Press, that I want to use this to take care of my community, meaning the Black and brown community, to lead and guide them through this process of the vaccine, of the pandemic.

To know that somebody that looks like them and is like them, is out there doing this thing for and with them.

And so with that, it gained a lot of attention, gained the attention of Mr.

Carl Kurlander who worked on things like St.

Elmo's Fire and Saved By the Bell back in the day.

He was very intrigued by my journey during COVID and we talked about the fact that TV shows nowadays don't, a lot of them don't really have a diverse perspective when it comes to the protagonist.

And still when we talk about our medical dramas, we have yet to see a diverse protagonist, meaning a Black man or woman or an Asian man or woman or you know, Asian Indian, so to speak, in the story of having to overcome microaggressions and overt racism and having, you know, being a woman in the profession, all of it.

And so hence came the idea of putting together the film, which is called In Good Hands.

And so I had to do several pitches and I kind of fumbled and I had the opportunity to pitch this movie idea in front of Kay Oyegun, one of the executive producers of This Is Us, one of my all time favorite TV shows.

And she asked me a critical question, do you write and do you have a writer?

And I said, no, I don't write, I don't have a writer, but my story's important.

She said, I didn't say your story wasn't important, just find the right people to put it together.

Long story short, found screenwriter, Miss Yasmin Crowley, young African American woman who is now administrative assistant at Paramount in New York City.

And we wrote the script within seven days, 16 page script.

And we filmed it over a weekend in voila, we had good hands, we premiered it in Pittsburgh and put it on the film festival circuit and it was taken up by the American Black Film Festival and we had an enormous opportunity there.

They literally took the screening from New York City to Los Angeles and now it'll be on American Airlines.

And so that's kind of the long and the short of how that came to be over a two year period.

And so very grateful that, you know, the only time that I've made a short film that has actually made the circuit and and been exposed and, and people have enjoyed it and people have connected with it, that's a more important thing is that people have really connected with it from various career paths, not just physicians.

- And in case people don't know, Dr.

Sylvia is also an advisor on the hit HBO series the Pitt, it takes place at a fictional hospital that is here in Pittsburgh.

And one of the things about the show, I think that resonates with people is that besides all the cool gnarly hospital room things that happen, it's, they touch a lot of things that are near and dear to the hearts of Pittsburghers and they touch on ailments in the emergency room, things that happen to people that are realistic and portrayed realistically.

So tell us how you stepped into that world and what exactly specifically you were involved in.

- Well, it's always about the village, right Minette?

I mean, like you and I are a village and you know, I always give credit to where credit is due.

And so a good friend of mine, Dr.

Beth Hoffman at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, does a lot of health and media work, especially research, and has one of the few health and media classes in public health in the, in the country.

And she continues to work closely with a nonprofit by the name of Hollywood Health and Society.

And their main job is to provide evidence-based data or details to TV shows, not just medical dramas, but any kind of TV show.

And so that's their ultimate goal is to bring real medicine to any TV show.

They said there's a new show that they're, they're putting together the former executive producers and directors of the hit show ER, medical drama series ER, it's putting together a new show called The Pitt, and they're looking for an emergency medicine physician who specializes in healthcare disparities.

And Dr.

Hoffman said, I know just the person.

So initially they set me up with a two hour Zoom call with executive producer Dr.

Joe Sachs, who's an incredible human being who happened to go to film school and is an active ER physician who worked on ER in the writer's room.

So the main question that they asked many of us medical advisors, was, what have you not yet seen on medical drama series or on television that you, or stories, storylines that you think need to be told?

And I began to tell them, especially within the health disparities arena, I began to tell them about a 17-year-old patient I had with sickle cell.

She was in a sickle cell pain crisis and in significant bone pain, probably 90 pounds soaking wet that was being held down by EMS and then later our security guards and was labeled as aggressive, agitated, all of that nature.

And I had to come in and, you know, basically advocate for her, defiantly advocate for her, you know, stand up for her, tell the security guards to back away.

And, and I thought it was really important.

I'm so tired of people even in the health profession calling patients with sickle cell pain seekers.

You know, when you have bone pain that is not, that is the type of pain that narcotics was made for.

Cancer is the type of pain narcotics is made for.

And I wanted that myth dispelled and they shared that storyline, you know, they changed a little bit in the way of the, the age of the patient, pretty much kept the storyline to a T. They asked me about the demographics of Pittsburgh, what does a hospital or ED look like in the way of race and ethnicity?

What does the community look like in the way of race and ethnicity?

Now this was March of 2024, so you have to understand that in March of 2024, they were just writing, they weren't even accepted as a pilot.

Their pilot wasn't even accepted yet.

In April of 2024, the pilot was accepted and I I got an email saying, look, congratulations.

This this TV show that you advised on is actually gonna be a TV show.

And then in May, I just wanted to thank Hollywood Health and Society.

And they said, it's your lucky day, we're gonna take you to the writer's room.

And I almost lost it, you know, I walk in the room, Noah Wyle's there, he wasn't there on the Zoom call, I almost passed out.

They had me sit at the head of the room again.

I literally, he was like, Dr.

Sylvia, it's okay.

I was like, whoa.

I think it hit me then that like, wow, this is the real deal.

Like, you know, what I contributed to is big time bigger than I had imagined.

And in that space, long story short, I said, I have one more storyline for you.

I said, you cannot talk about healthcare unless you talk about Freedom House Ambulance, the beginning and the pioneers in EMS medicine, as we know it started with 25 black men later black women led by Dr.

Peter Safer, an Austrian immigrant and later medical director, Dr.

Nancy Caroline, an Israeli woman.

I mean, you couldn't get any more utopic kind of situation than that.

You know, you have Black and brown people taking care of their neighborhood where they were very underserved, very marginalized, significant poor healthcare outcomes that they turned 180.

And it's a phenomenal, phenomenal story, unfortunately shut down by racism.

But I said, you have to tell this story.

- Yeah, I mean, as a a, a big fan of the show, I've seen all of those episodes and I'm especially fond of the Freedom House episode because of the Freedom House documentary that WQED produced.

And I guess I need to say, this full disclosure, you appeared on camera in our series, "A Matter of Trust," talking to the African American and the communities of color about COVID during the times of the pandemic.

And I think that wasn't the first time that we met, but you have been a full service doctor on so many things.

So I think it's so perfect that a, you know, that you're involved in the Pitt.

So I don't know how long we've been friends now, but you and I are having coffee one morning and you told me in your usual confident, matter of fact, wait, hey, guess what, what did you tell me?

- Hey, guess what, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I think I was about to start chemo.

- Wait, even today, this interview is taking place on this particular date because you have chemo tomorrow.

- I have chemo tomorrow, my last chemo tomorrow I'm my last chemo, hopefully forever.

Forever.

- Congratulations.

- We're calling it, we're calling it here.

So in late summer, early fall, so August and September of 2025 was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Interesting to be, you know, I've been a patient before the healthcare system, you know, everybody's been a patient at some point in their life, you know, but this, this hit a little bit different.

One, it's cancer, it's the big bad word that's hard for everybody to handle.

That people immediately gravitate to think about death and dying and misery and pain when, when they hear that diagnosis and, and I'm human, I'm human.

And so my mind did go there for a little bit.

Again, like I said, I'm a woman of faith and I leaned into that and felt a sense of peace and then, and then immediately found my frustration in navigating the healthcare system that I in fact work for.

And so here I was like, what the irony of this, that I'm a physician who has incredible knowledge about a lot of things, not about breast cancer.

'cause I'm a kid's doctor, or thank God not a lot of kids, if any, get breast cancer.

Thank God for that.

And so this was a whole new territory for me to navigate.

And what I recognized was that I was having trouble navigating it.

So I quickly went to social media.

Interestingly enough, during my, the film festival in Miami in June, a good friend of mine went to medical school together.

One of my best friends, she looked directly at me and she said, she knows me.

I get so busy, I've not been taking care of my own health.

And she looked at me directly and said, Sylvia, you better go back home and you better do all the screening tests.

Like this is non-negotiable.

So I listened to her.

So I signed up for my end, endoscopy, colonoscopy, mammogram, had my mammogram at the end of July.

And it said they see something abnormal.

But that, that happened, that's happened in the past.

I've had abnormal mammograms.

I, I'm the woman with a small dense breast that has to talk to the radiologist.

Some of you ladies may be familiar with that.

So that was nothing new.

But interestingly enough, there were lymph nodes on the read this time and there were never a lymph node.

So I was like, hmm.

But I kind of put that in my back of my mind.

But I was like, probably should get a repeat.

Couldn't get a repeat until a month later till the end of August.

So a whole month went by in that repeat, you know, you know, spidey senses went up because the mammogram went longer than usual.

I got an ultrasound and I saw a circle in my breast and they were measuring it and I was like, Hmm, that doesn't look good.

Radiologist came in, she's like, I'm not gonna mess around with you.

You're a doctor.

This looks like cancer.

You know, shed a few tears, reached out to God and I was like, what can we do?

How can we do this better?

Long story short, a month went by of navigating what kind of cancer this was.

You know, I got a biopsy two weeks later.

It's just the process dragged out.

It was very frustrating to know that, hey, we know I have cancer.

Let's, you know, can we just get rid of it?

And it's like, no, we gotta figure out the nuances first, which now I respect in retrospect.

But the nuances took over a month and a half to figure out before we started chemo.

So this kind of like, we gotta figure out what kind of tumor it is, how aggressive it is, whether it's gonna go back or not, was very agonizing and frustrating.

And then figuring out how far the cancer had gone in my body.

All of that took weeks to figure out.

And so I said, you know what, I'm gonna share my journey with everybody so that they know that they're not, alone and they might be able to better navigate the system even if they're not a doctor.

And so that's kind of where we are now.

- You've had to learn patience and, and I mean you were already a self-reflective person, but learning the patience along this journey and bringing your family into it, because I understand your oldest daughter is also being like your, your cinematographer doing this whole process.

- Yes, she is a senior in high school.

So many of you remember being a senior in high school, that is probably one of your most critical years of high school.

And so having to work on college applications at the same time, hearing that your mom has breast cancer.

And what folks do not know is that in 2021, my husband was diagnosed with kidney cancer.

It was a different type of journey for him.

It was found at stage one.

And so fortunately for him, they were able to remove the tumor and the kidney and he was cured essentially.

No radiation, no chemo, it was cancer.

All the same though.

That's what we learned in our, in the cancer world, is that there's no hierarchy to cancer.

There's no to say that, oh, I didn't get chemo, I didn't get radiation.

So I have, you know, as as somebody told me cancer light or called herself having cancer light, I said, there's no such thing as cancer light, cancer is cancer.

And so back to the story of my daughters, my daughters, both of them are like, man, both of our parents have had cancer now.

So you could imagine the weight of a soon to be 18-year-old and 10-year-old of having to navigate this world.

But they have been phenomenal and they have been great.

And we have tried to find means and ways they've had a phenomenal village to support them, which is the most important thing weve tried to find means and ways in the way of therapy to help if need be.

We're very cognizant of the load that it carries on the entire family, including my husband who's been there hand and foot all the way through, couldn't have done do it without any of of them in particular.

And he's been there every step of the way.

But even even more than that, the greater village, whether it be, you know, here in Pittsburgh, my friends and family outside of Pittsburgh and even this new social media community that I've built, have been phenomenally positive, phenomenally supportive.

And, and this is where we appreciate things like social media or media.

When it works out of love, you know, and not out of hate and works outta support and empathy, then it works very, very well.

And that's what's at least been happening for me.

- Well, I, I am, I'm so grateful for and enthusiastic for your positivity and that pragmatic part of you that just tackles things.

And I know that there might be feelings of sadness and doubt in like what the hell's going on with my body, but I love that you have stayed like true.

Your vision is true, your aim is true.

And that you're, with the support of your family, you're doing the job you always do.

You just get it done.

I'm very much looking forward to that phone call, text message, conversation when you're like, I'm all done.

- We're all done.

Yeah.

It's coming soon.

It's coming soon.

- But thank you so much.

I'm so proud of you.

I'm so glad we got to know each other.

- Well, Thank you.

Thank you for having me on here and congratulations on this podcast.

- I am very, very fortunate in that I have met some amazing people in my life and then and so far all of you have said Sure, sure.

I'd love to.

So... - Of course.

- I'm just banking on that goodwill, man.

That's all.

- Yeah.

Anything for Miss Minette.