Lifetime Achievement

Attending Physician, Baystate Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center

He’s Spent His Career Serving the Underserved

Dr. Andrew Balder

“As a person, he’s authentic in his desire to truly make things better for people. He is the first to show up whenever and wherever issues of equity and social justice are to be addressed. And he brings something extra to the table in his role as a knowledgeable physician.”

“What is really important for everyone to know about him is his compassion and patience for those he serves. He truly cares about unhoused individuals. This is not a job for him, but a calling. He gravitates toward helping underserved, marginal, and vulnerable individuals.”

Those two separate testimonials come from previous winners of the Healthcare Hero award in the Lifetime Achievement category — the former from Frank Robinson, the recently retired vice president of Public Health for Baystate Health, and the latter courtesy of Helen Caulton-Harris, commissioner of Health for the city of Springfield.

And they sum up, effectively and concisely, the work of the latest recipient of that award, Dr. Andrew Balder, attending physician at the Baystate Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center, and why he is worthy of that honor.

Indeed, when it comes to not only his commitment to help the homeless, but also his efforts in the realm of maternal-fetal health — and his tireless efforts to serve patients living in some in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the state — his work certainly isn’t just work. It is, indeed, a calling. And he is authentic in his desire to make things truly better for people.

You might say he gets some of that from his mother.

She was a psychiatrist who also served as a general practitioner in West Philadelphia, and during World War II, when many of the male physicians were called to serve, was a general practitioner for a large population.

“She realized that 75% of the patients that needed to see her just wanted to talk,” Balder said, adding that she went on to be a child psychologist as well as a GP, often relating stories about her work and bringing her young son to her offices, where he would hang out in the waiting room while she saw patients.

During a med-school interview, when someone asked him what he wanted to do for a career, he repied, “anything except what my mother does,” he recalled.

“And here I am in primary care. And what’s primary care? She said it’s 75% psychiatry,” he went on, adding that he has some patients who mostly just want to talk — about life and the challenges they’re confronting — and he engages them. Most importantly, he listens.

Beyond the day-to-day work with his patients, Balder has indeed become deeply involved with broader programs to serve the underserved, including as one-time chair of (and still an active participant in) the Springfield Department of Health and Human Services’ Project Baby Springfield. This is an initiative that addresses issues related to infant mortality, child mortality health, and birth outcomes, especially for disproportionately represented women of color, by bringing education and awareness to families and caregivers about healthy pregnancies and safe infant sleep, and ensuring that all mothers, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, or income level, can access excellent pre- and post-natal care.

He has also become involved with programs to assist homeless individuals in Springfield, serving as chief medical officer of the city’s Health Services for the Homeless since 2015.

These and other efforts to serve the underserved not only improve quality of life for many people in Springfield and beyond, they inspire others to want to give back as well.

“He is the first to show up whenever and wherever issues of equity and social justice are to be addressed.”

“Dr. Balder is present, dedicated, and passionate for the care of those who are traditionally underserved in Springfield,” said Paul Pirraglia, division chief of General Medicine and Community Health at Baystate Health, and a previous Healthcare Hero himself. “He is tireless in this work and sets an impeccable example for service, not just for those in healthcare, but for all.”

For these and many other reasons, Balder is worthy of the title Healthcare Hero.

His Life’s Work

When he was called by BusinessWest and informed that he was being honored as a Healthcare Hero in the Lifetime Achievement category, Balder, after first saying “thank you,” joked, “I guess I can retire now.”

He admits to thinking about that day, but he’s not there yet, which is good for the city of Springfield and especially for those underserved populations that he has committed himself to serving pretty much since he started his career.

Indeed, after a short stint as a staff physician with Philadelphia Health Associates/John Hancock Health Plan of Philadelphia in King of Prussia, Penn., he came to Springfield, Baystate Health, and, soon thereafter, the Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center.

There, he has found that, by and large, his mother was right; psychiatry is a big part of primary care.

Dr. Andrew Balder, seen here talking with a patient at the Baystate Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center, counts listening among his strongest skills.

“Whatever you’re doing in primary medicine, part of the guts of it is understanding behavior and behavior change, and also self-efficacy and self-image, all of those things,” he explained. “And that’s basically talk; it may be structured, it may be unstructured, it all starts with listening, but it really is the human interaction and exchange of things, much more than pulling out the electronic prescription pad.

“Most of what you’re doing is understanding people and dealing with their goals, their dreams, their desires, their perception of health, and their behaviors,” he went on, adding that he’s learned, and really always knew, that it’s more important to listen than to talk.

And that pretty much sums up what Balder has been doing for the past 35 years. But what’s more noteworthy is the fact that he’s spent almost all his career working with underserved populations, which he described as his life’s goal.

When asked why, he said he came out of a family that was attuned to issues of equity and civil rights back in the ’30s and ’40s, and “this sort of gets baked in — what you hear, what you think, and partially what you feel.”

These sentiments explain, at least in part, why he left Pennsylvania, where he was caring for “General Electric space engineers,” as he put it, and came to Springfield. He first worked in the North End in a job that involved far more work in the hospital setting before eventually coming to Mason Square, with the attitude that he wasn’t coming to save the people there, but listen to them and serve them.

“You’re not playing the role of savior. You’re not riding into a community to save it — the community will save itself.”

“You’re not playing the role of savior. You’re not riding into a community to save it — the community will save itself,” he explained. “They will empower themselves … but the tools that are necessary are not always obvious or easily available, so you get to speak up with individuals for themselves and speak up with communities for themselves. But you’re not there to save the world; that’s not going to happen.”

When asked what he likes most about his work in this setting, Balder said, “you get to meet a whole lot of people you would never have met otherwise, and this deepens your understanding of human beings and how, yes, we’re all different, but we have many commonalities and differences that we don’t always appreciate.”

Birth of a Notion

Elaborating, he said he also gets a chance to generate change “on an individual or larger level,” and that no two days are the same.

And he attributes both to the fact that, in his role, he has been able to “build my own life and my own job,” one that has him seeing patients at the health center some days, training residents, leading a diabetes clinic, continuing his work in the broad realm of maternal-fetal health, providing care to the homeless at facilities in Springfield and Northampton, and much more.

He enjoys this variety, which enables him to extend his leadership, and overall impact, well beyond the Mason Square center.

That’s certainly true of his work with the homeless population, which he described as challenging, but rewarding — challenging because many of these individuals have been removed from the healthcare system for many years, most have substance-abuse and mental-health issues, and almost all of them have multiple health problems.

Meanwhile, most don’t have the resources to follow through on what he might recommend, Balder said, adding that this includes financial issues, lack of transportation, lack of housing, lack of a phone, or all of the above.

“All that makes it hard to follow up, and it makes it hard to continue consistent motivation, consistent sensitive messaging, and dialogue,” he said, adding that overall efforts to serve this population are limited by a shortage of providers, nurses, and resources to go where the homeless are.

But there are certainly some qualitative indicators that these efforts are making a difference.

“You don’t get the immediate reward of ‘oh my goodness, my glucose is doing better,’ or ‘my blood pressure is better; let’s focus on that today,’ because you’re always dealing with the other issues first and the difficulties of achieving certain things,” he explained. “But when they do, they’re happy; the patients are thrilled with the changes they’ve made. But they’re always getting beaten by something.”

As for Project Baby Springfield, that’s another initiative, started more than 20 years ago, that is trying to move the needle on a persistent problem for the City of Homes.

“We’re a small band of warriors,” Balder said of those who have led initiatives over the years that eventually came to be branded as Project Baby, adding that those involved have worked to identify the causes behind infant mortality and the reasons for the inequity in the numbers involving certain populations.

“In our country, as well as in our city, Black infants die before their first birthday at two to three times the rate of white infants,” he said. “The numbers go up, the numbers go down, they gradually improve, they occasionally get worse … but the disparity and inequity continues to exist in the same proportions.”

As an example of the work undertaken, he cited efforts to curb what are known as ‘unsafe-sleep-related deaths.’

“We managed to get to some money together and did a four-month campaign on safe sleep,” he noted. “We had things on the sides of buses, in the buses, videos, all sorts of stuff. We took it on as Project Baby to push that message; we did talks in public, we did talks with small groups, we sponsored the development of the new maternal-child healthline in Springfield.”

Other initiatives have included pregnancy, delivery, and post-partum support, especially in communities of color, where such efforts have proven to improve birth outcomes, with fewer cesarian sections, Balder explained, adding that one of the latest initiatives has involved breastfeeding.

“We’ve taken on small things over the years to try to stir the drink and help bring the message to the public,” he explained. “I wish we were bigger and we were doing more, but we are a band of happy warriors.”

Bottom Line

Few people in this region know more about the underserved populations in Springfield than Frank Robinson and Helen Caulton-Harris. They’ve both been on the front lines of efforts to improve the lives of those constituencies.

And Balder has been right there with them. He knows he can’t save the world, or even his small piece of it. But he can make a difference, and he has, in a great many ways.

And this helps explain why he’s a Healthcare Hero.