Your Role in Pursuing Health Equity
Your Role in Pursuing Health Equity
What does it mean to be devoted to tackling health disparities or promoting health equities? Why should we care and what is the role we all have to play? Health inequities can’t be limited to a public health problem, or an individual problem, rather, heath disparities are reinforced and recreated by every aspect of society both large and small. We all have a responsibility to promote health equity. Join us for an engaging discussion that encourages the audience to consider where they fit in to the fight for health equity.
As Associate Director of the Urban Health Institute, Dr. Purnell leads efforts to facilitate and recognize collaborations between communities, universities, healthcare delivery systems, government, and the private sector to build collective capacity for achieving health equity in Baltimore. In addition to her role at UHI she is an assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds joint faculty appointments in the Johns Hopkins Departments of Surgery, Health Policy and Management, and Health Behavior and Society. She is the director of community and stakeholder engagement for the Hopkins Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation, the associate director for Education and Training at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, core faculty at the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research, and affiliated faculty with the Bloomberg American Health Initiative and the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research.
A native of the Mississippi Delta, Purnell is an epidemiologist and health services researcher whose work focuses on identifying patient- centered and community-engaged solutions to address health and healthcare disparities for people living with chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension. She has received national and international research honors and has published findings from her work in leading medical and public health journals, including JAMA and Health Affairs. Purnell is deeply committed to community service, teaching, and mentoring and is the recipient of multiple Teaching Excellence Awards from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.