Page 16 - BusinessWest Women of Impact 2020

Congrats – thanks and well deserved to my/our ‘Dr. Anthony Fauci’ – Health and Human Services Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris!
Good health and God bless.
Respectfully,
Mayor Domenic J. Sarno
P.S. We’ll beat this COVID-19, too!
Archive photo from before COVID-19 mask order.
A16 NOVEMBER 9, 2020
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Helen Caulton-Harris has long recognized the connection between economic well- being and health, and COVID-19 has negatively impacted both for many families.
kept her plenty busy even Continued from page A14 without a pandemic to track every day. But it’s also been
an opportunity to spotlight one of her passions: the demographic inequities that exist in public health.
“The pandemic has caused all of us to pause and really tear the Band-Aid off of what has been a festering wound,” Caulton-Harris said. “We’ve had to look criticially at our populations and how this virus is really impacting our community.”
It starts with the frontline workers — not only healthcare workers, but grocery-store employees, bus drivers, those who clean the hospital rooms, and so many others. “Those individuals overwhelmingly are black and brown, based on the data that we have.”
Caulton-Harris
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Then there’s the connection between poverty and healthcare access, and how economic factors put people at greater risk.
“Poverty is really the number-one public-health issue that I’ve had to deal with over the years
— the fact that individuals living in poverty do not have equal access to the kinds of outcomes that we want for a healthy population,” she
told BusinessWest. “So, from the beginning, we recognized that this virus really is impacting on the black and brown communities of the city of Springfield. It has been eye-opening from that perspective.”
Game Changer
“We were raised to understand we had a role in the community and needed to give back.”
‘Equity,’ as applied to topics of social justice, is more commonly discussed today than it once was, but it’s much more than a buzzword to Caulton-Harris, who recalls being passionate about matters of equity as a UMass Amherst student in the 1970s.
“During that time, there was a lot of momentum around social change and equity,” she said. “Public health says that everyone should have equal access, and we were thinking even then about how we can make social change. We are still — I am still — on that journey.”
Women of
tasking her with combining the then-separate Department of Public
When Mayor Michael Albano — the first of three Springfield mayors she has served under — appointed Caulton-Harris to her role in 1996,
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Health and Department of Human Services, she didn’t consider herself a political person or a public figure. But she did relish the challenge of
tackling some very serious
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Caulton-Harris
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issues, from infant mortality to teen pregnancy; from HIV and
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