(upbeat music) - Welcome everyone.

I'm Steve Adubato.

We're going to get into a very important discussion about ending racism with a longtime friend Barry Ostrowsky, president and CEO of RWJBarnabas Health, also a board member at NJ PBS and DeAnna Minus-Vincent, Executive Vice President, Chief Social Justice, and Accountability Officer at RWJBarnabas Health.

Good to see both of you.

- Thanks for having us, Steve.

Good to see you.

- We've had many offline conversations, as well as I've moderated forums within the system, talking about these issues.

Barry, set the tone.

What is the ending racism initiative and is that that's ending racism together, correct?

That's the official name, right?

- Yeah.

We use that terminology doing things together in order to portray the fact that most of what we would need to do has to be done as a team.

From our standpoint, our mission is a simple one, make our communities healthier and provide better lives for those who live in our community.

And as you know, we've addressed social determinants of substandard housing and food insecurity and chronic unemployment, but frankly we'll never attain the goal of making our communities healthier and happier unless we address that third rail issue, the existence of structural racism.

And of course this last year of social justice, visibility has promoted for us the absolute need to be very specific and focused, And DeAnna leading us on this journey of dismantling the kind of structural racism that exists in our society, and frankly, the behavior that flows from that.

And unless you do that, frankly, we're not going to be able to make our communities the kinds of places that people should be living in happier and healthier lives.

- Deanna, A, what does it mean to you to be leading this initiative and B, how do you tie ending racism or the issue of racism with public health, please DeAnna.

- So as a woman of color, both African-American and indigenous, I am so proud to lead this effort.

It is both exciting and thrilling to change the system, but it's also daunting.

It's something racism, systemic racism has existed in this country since its inception.

I know that I always want to change immediately, but it has to be incremental change.

And as we move through this journey, we see, as we're talking to our teammates, our patients, we see faces light up because it is something that we haven't talked about.

It's something that we've kept hidden, and it means so much to so many people that we're finally bringing it to the floor.

- And by the way, we're about this complex, challenging, longstanding issue of racism.

We're also fighting the internet in the process because there's a little bit of a delay, but in all seriousness Barry, talk about, and we've talked about this with DeAnna and other leaders in the organization and RWJBarnabas Health is an underwriter of what we do.

And I've done leadership coaching there, but this issue keeps coming up, which is the, if you will, the inequities, the racial inequities in terms of delivery of healthcare.

Barry first, then Deanna, what does it mean?

Give us a concrete example of what that means.

- Well, you know, Steve, one of the things about this particular issue and many others is it's predicated on facts.

The data speaks clearly to the fact that people of color and particularly black people in this country suffer from structural disadvantages when it comes to accessibility to healthcare, when it comes to the actual treatment of healthcare, which by the way, is produced by those who are exquisitely trained.

But in the training, there are racial biases.

And so what you find is people of color who presented the emergency department do not receive the same level of pain medication on this ridiculous assumption that they're better able to consume pain than other people.

The maternal child issues, the data around maternal death in terms of the black community is outrageous.

- Excuse me Barry, African-American women are seven times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman, by the way, check out our interview with the first lady Tammy Murphy who talks about that extensively.

Barry pickup your point.

- No, that's right.

And by the way, after childbirth presenting in the emergency department with a post childbirth issue is typically misdiagnosed and frequently as fatal.

And so these are data points.

This is not some social notion of just justice.

These are data points that suggest clearly that people of color receive lesser, less frequent and most, more inconvenient care.

And unless we're going to fix that, we will never attain that which we set out to attain, which is to make communities of all peoples, of all colors, healthier and happier.

So from my standpoint, the data speaks volumes about the need and anyone who pushes this off as some kind notion is absolutely wrong.

The data proves the need for this kind of focused attention and initiative.

- Deanna, how has COVID-19 as we taped this program later in 2021, how has COVID-19 laid bare the issues that Barry just laid out in terms of the racial inequities and the inconsistency is not the right word, it's way worse than that in terms of how people of color are treated in the healthcare system, how has it made it even worse?

- I think COVID-19 has brought prominence to the issue.

I think for people of color, we've always felt it.

I think it has magnified it for people in the majority.

It has some of the policies that came with COVID-19 were grossly inequitable.

And I think when COVID-19 struck populations of color, we could no longer ignore the fact that systemic racism was a root cause for those populations being hit so hard.

Everything from residential segregation to food insecurity, to chronic disease, to close living quarters, to being essential workers, and you could follow the track directly to COVID and it was eyeopening for people.

Even when you look at those of us who are more affluent, you had to look at the history of it.

And as Barry laid out disparities in maternal child health, those things are not socioeconomic dependent.

So we had to look at everything up close and personal, and we couldn't sweep it under the rug any longer.

And, but in America, our memory is short.

So I'm very fortunate to work for a system where we are continuing to push the needle and not just leaving it behind.

So COVID did open the door for people's eyes.

- DeAnna, I'm so sorry for interrupting.

I just, we got a minute and a half left real quick.

The vaccine, the resistance to the vaccine in the African-American community, real quick Barry, and then Deanna 30 seconds or less.

How is that tied to the ending racism together initiative?

Because it's very real, Berry.

- Well, it's reflective of a legacy of people of color, assuming, and to a great extent based again, on fact that they were the subject of experimentation when we develop new approaches and techniques in healthcare.

So there was this immediate skepticism that a vaccine that was rushed to the market, although with all the regulatory approvals could well have been yet another attempt in some cases to ignore this imbalance in how we treated people of color in these developments.

So I think that skepticism was appropriate.

The facts, however, are persuasive, that that wasn't the case, but it's a natural reaction I think if you're a person of color to this brand new kind of treatment for even a pandemic level illness.

- And by the way, those experiments, if you will, healthcare initiatives also sponsored by the federal government.

A few seconds on this, DeAnna, before we have to go on vaccine hesitance.

Barry laid out the historical context, but what do we need to do?

- I think we need to build trusting relationships with communities of color, because there is a historical frame, but there's also lack of customer service and lack of trust and built in with communities of color.

I mean the issue of pain management, the issue of assuming that African-Americans are drug seeking.

So really how do we bridge those relationships and how do we do it in a sustainable way that doesn't just say, we're doing it for you to get the vaccine, but that we're here.

We're trying to make inroads.

And we're in it for the long haul.

- A lot of work to do.

We'll continue the discussion.

Deanna, Barry, thank you so much for joining us.

Part of our Confronting Racism three-year long initiative so far.

We'll continue it.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Wells Fargo.

The Russell Berrie Foundation.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, Clean Energy program.

MD Advantage Insurance Company.

The North Ward Center.

Georgian Court University.

Fedway Associates, Inc. And by The Adler Aphasia Center.

Promotional support provided by Jaffe Communications.

And by AM970 The Answer.

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