This week’s guest expert on the Public Health Out Loud podcast is Dr. Andrew Saal; a family physician and the chief medical officer of the largest community health center in Rhode Island, Providence Community Health Centers (PCHC).  

Co-hosts Dr. Jim McDonald and Dr. Philip Chan ask Dr. Saal about the difference between reactive and proactive healthcare. They also ask him about how transforming primary care to a team-based approach could relieve crowded emergency rooms and reduce burnout among healthcare workers.  

How has PCHC implemented a team-approach to care? Download this week’s episode to find out.  

Pharmacists do a lot more than dispense medication. Pharmacies have become a major hub for people to access health care services—like testing, vaccine, and treatment—during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, roughly 75 percent of the country’s eligible population got their COVID-19 vaccine from a pharmacy.  How has the role of the pharmacist evolved over time? This week’s guest experts, Dr. Jeffrey Bratberg and Dr. Sabrina Silveira, will explain just that. 

Dr. Bratberg is a clinical professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy, the academic collaborations officer at the Rhode Island Department of Health’s Academic Institute, and associate editor for the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. Dr. Silveira is a newly graduated pharmacist from URI’s College of Pharmacy with experience as a hospital outpatient pharmacist.  

What kind of training is required for pharmacists? What additional opportunities are there to expand pharmacists’ role in healthcare delivery? Download this week’s episode to find out.  

This week’s guest expert has been managing outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics throughout her career. Meet Dr. Utpala Bandy, the Medical Director for the Division of Preparedness, Response, Infectious Diseases, and Emergency Medical Services at the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH). Dr. Bandy gives a tour of her healthcare experiences from around the globe, including her education and the onset of her career in India, and the front-line training she received throughout the United Kingdom and America.  

At RIDOH, Dr. Bandy has played a critical part in managing outbreaks and epidemics throughout the state’s recent history. Co-hosts Dr. Jim McDonald and Dr. Philip Chan ask her about a rabies outbreak that threatened Rhode Island’s domestic animals and wildlife in the 90s, a salmonella outbreak in 2010 that changed the food industry’s equipment standards nationwide, and, what many call the outbreak most comparable to COVID-19, the H1N1 virus.  

Dr. Bandy has also been an invaluable  "healthcare hero behind the scenes" at RIDOH during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. How does the COVID-19 response compare to previous outbreak responses? How long could we be living with COVID-19 as an endemic disease? Download this week’s episode to learn more.  

Trauma-informed care shifts the focus from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” A trauma-informed approach to health acknowledges that physicians and healthcare organizations need to have a complete picture of a patient’s life situation — past and present — in order to provide effective healthcare services with a focus on healing. 

This week’s guest experts are Dr. Catherine DeGood; a physician in family and addiction medicine, medical director of CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, and a physician at Butler Hospital; and Linda Hurley, the chief executive officer at CODAC Behavioral Healthcare, which is a non-profit organization in Rhode Island that has provided treatment, recovery, and prevention services to individuals and families within local communities for more than 40 years. 

How come some people can manage stress and trauma better than others? What are some coping skills to help manage stress so that we react in a way that’s helpful to us? Download this week’s episode to learn more.  

This week’s guest on the Public Health Out Loud podcast is an expert on housing instability, the eviction crisis, and related impacts on health outcomes. Dr. Gracie Himmelstein is a resident in internal medicine at the University of California Los Angeles with a PhD in demography from Princeton University. She has also conducted research with The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, which creates data, interactive tools, and research to help neighbors and policymakers understand the eviction crisis. 

Co-hosts Dr. Jim McDonald and Dr. Philip Chan talk about how COVID-19 shed light on housing instability, and what Rhode Island is doing to address it. They also ask Dr. Himmelstein about long-term solutions to promote housing stability in Rhode Island and nationwide.  

Download this week’s episode to learn more.  

In July of 2021, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee signed legislation allowing for a two-year harm reduction center pilot program in the state. This means Rhode Island will be among the first in the nation to license and establish harm reduction centers, which are places where people can go to use drugs safely.  

What will a harm reduction center in Rhode Island look like? How effective have harm reduction centers been at preventing overdose deaths in other countries?  

Learn more about Rhode Island’s pilot program from guest experts: Dr. Liz Samuels, an emergency and addiction medicine physician, researcher at the Brown University Department of Emergency Medicine and the School of Epidemiology at the Brown School of Public Health, and the consulting assistant medical director for the Overdose Prevention Program at the Rhode Island Department of Health; Sarah Beister, policy and evaluation lead for RIDOH’s Overdose Prevention Program; and Lauren Conkey, community program lead for RIDOH’s Overdose Prevention Program. 

Download this week’s episode and visit PreventOverdoseRI.org to learn more about harm reduction initiatives in Rhode Island. 

In this week’s episode, you’ll hear co-hosts Dr. Jim McDonald and Dr. Philip Chan talk about their roads to becoming doctors, and their journeys into public health. What did Dr. Chan’s time as an ambulance driver teach him about medicine? What made Dr. McDonald decide to drop his undergraduate major in photography? Download this week’s episode to learn more.  

When we think about vending machines, we imagine sugary drinks and candy bars. But in Rhode Island, vending machines are being used to dispense harm reduction tools that can help prevent overdose and reduce the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. Through these vending machines, individuals can access free, sterile syringes, rapid tests for sexually transmitted infections, naloxone (Narcan®), wound care and hygiene kits, and fentanyl test strips any time of day or night.  

In this week's episode, you’ll learn about this innovative harm reduction strategy thanks to our guest experts from the Rhode Island Department of Health and AIDS Care Ocean State, a local non-profit connecting adults, families, adolescents and children who are affected by or at risk of HIV infection to quality housing, case management services, medical and nursing care, and prevention resources. Our guest experts are Katie Howe, the Prevention Program Manager for the Center for HIV, Hepatitis, STD, and TB Epidemiology; Katelyn Case, a Harm Reduction Case Manager at AIDS Care Ocean State; and Vanessa Perez, the Lead Prevention Worker for AIDS Care Ocean State.  

Where are these harm reduction vending machines located? How are the machines helping to link people who use drugs to critical resources and wraparound services to improve health and well-being? Download this week’s episode to learn more.  

Research shows that adverse childhood experiences, like abuse or parental abandonment, can negatively impact a person’s health outcomes later in life. This week’s guest expert, Dr. Robert Sege, is determined to flip pediatrics upside down by asking the question: Can positive childhood experiences foster better health outcomes for children later in life? 

Dr. Sege is a pediatrician at Tufts Children’s Hospital in Boston, Mass. In this week’s episode, he talks with co-hosts Dr. Philip Chan and Dr. Jim McDonald about how positive relationships, environments, engagements, and opportunities for emotional growth play a critical role in a child’s life. He also gives advice to parents on how to foster these positive experiences in their household. Download this week’s episode to learn more.

Many Rhode Islanders living in specific geographies have experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths throughout the pandemic. For example, in the seven hardest-hit ZIP codes, people of color as young as 25 are experiencing higher hospitalization rates than white people over 60 years old. Such differences are directly connected to the social conditions in which some communities of color are more likely to live and work every day, and to systems of structural racism and discrimination that have historically undermined the health and well-being of these communities.  

This week’s guest experts, Dr. Katrina Byrd and Jennifer Bandy, talk about their personal and professional experiences working with some of the harder hit communities of Rhode Island throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Dr. Byrd is an adult and pediatric infectious disease specialist. She is a fellow at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, RI. Bandy is a professor of critical race theory at Providence College and the education director at West End Community Center, which includes an early learning center, youth center, and food bank that serves families in Providence, RI.   

In this week’s episode of the Public Health Out Loud podcast, co-hosts Dr. Philip Chan and Dr. Jim McDonald ask: how can public health advocates and physicians alike foster trust between themselves and Black and Brown communities? Download this week’s episode to find out.