Dr. DeNorval Unthank Endowed Lectureship in Health Equity
With the
generous support and vision of Drs. William and Nathalie Johnson, in partnership with OHSU, Legacy Health System and Moda Health.
2018 Lecture
"I believe that your race does not have to be a determinant of your destiny."
– Dr. David R. Williams, TED Talk
Getting to Health Equity
David R. Williams, Ph.D., M.P.H., Harvard University
- Wednesday, Feb. 28
In Oregon, members of underserved communities are more likely to be diagnosed with, and suffer disproportionately from, such chronic illnesses as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and HIV/AIDS and to die prematurely from these and other causes. These broad, persistent disparities are neither mysterious nor pre-ordained. They are driven by factors that include unconscious bias in our health care system. David R. Williams, Ph.D., M.P.H., will discuss the forces fueling such inequities and how to intervene, making Oregon – and America – healthier for all.
Dr. Williams is the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura
Smart Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of
Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies and
Sociology at Harvard University.
His scholarship in the complex ways in which
socioeconomic status, race, stress, racism, health behavior and religious
involvement can affect health is internationally recognized. The Everyday
Discrimination Scale he developed is among the most widely used measures of
discrimination in health studies around the world.
In early 2017, Brian Gibbs, Ph.D., OHSU vice president for equity and inclusion, and John Hunter, M.D., CEO of the OHSU Health System and then-interim dean of the OHSU School of Medicine, envisioned a lectureship that would concentrate institutional and community focus on health equity and amplify the work of OHSU under the leadership of OHSU President Joe Robertson.
They approached William Johnson, M.D., president of Moda Health, and Nathalie Johnson, M.D., medical director or the Legacy Breast Cancer Institute. The Drs. Johnson came to recognize the inequities in our health care system during their childhoods, Dr. Nathalie Johnson on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and Dr. William Johnson in Los Angeles.
The Drs. Johnson embraced the opportunity to endow the lectureship through the OHSU Foundation, together with Legacy Health and Moda Health, and name it for Dr. DeNorval Unthank (1899-1977, see below).
"We have felt an urgency to bring the community together to understand the human and the financial costs of health disparities and the forces, including implicit bias in our health care system, which fuel them," said Dr. Nathalie Johnson. "Because it is only as a community that we will solve them."
William E. Johnson, M.D., F.A.C.S., M.B.A., trained as a
vascular surgeon and is now senior vice president at Moda,
Inc. and president of Moda Health.
Nathalie M. Johnson,
M.D., F.A.C.S., is medical director of
Portland's Legacy Cancer Institute and an OHSU clinical professor of surgery.
Dr. DeNorval Unthank was among
the first African American physicians in Oregon and the only black physician
practicing in Oregon in the 1930s.
Dr. Unthank moved to Portland in 1929. He became the first black member of the Portland City Club in 1943 and co-founded the Portland chapter of the National Urban League in 1945. Exclusionary housing practices and attitudes caused his family to move four times before settling in 1952 in the Albina District, which became the heart of Portland's African American community after a 1948 flood destroyed the Kaiser shipyard workers housing community of Vanport.
Unthank and his wife, Thelma Shipman, had five children: DeNorval Jr. (1929–2000), James, Lesley, Thelma (1940–2009), and Thomas. A park, a health clinic and a senior living facility in the Boise Neighborhood (also in the Albina District) were dedicated in his name.