Advancing Healthcare to Improve Health for All People 

The Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Office of Health Equity is the evolved iteration of our institutional commitment that is responsive to the needs of the various populations served. The evolution reflects a more expansive view of our purpose. The current titular designation represents our enhanced awareness of the ubiquity of health inequities and the necessity for a comprehensive approach to health equity science and equity-enhancing initiatives.

As an office, we are today centered in community engagement under the auspices of health equity and carry this objective forward in the entire portfolio of our activities: welcoming events, affinity group activities, and campus-wide discussions addressing the pressing themes impacting health, science and healthcare with open invitations to the entire constituency of our Chicago campus.  

We remain steadfast in our aspirational goal of reducing health inequity via diversity of ideation and inclusive excellence. That work is even more inspired as the portfolio of those at risk for health inequity includes innumerable constituencies now accounting for ~ 50% of the U.S. population. Given the breadth of people affected, and the extent of recalcitrant inequities, how could there not be an Office of Health Equity?  

Among our programs, one stands as a timeless and always pertinent asset: the Lyceum Speaker Series. This program hosts professionals of national reputation offering leading-edge perspectives on matters impacting health, health outcomes, and equitable care. Prior guests include a former U.S. Surgeon General, writers for the New York Times, a former U.S. astronaut, deans and university provosts. Recently, the Lyceum Series expanded to include both a campus-wide research symposium encompassing health inequities and strategies for change, and small-group discussions highlighting research methodologies and new areas of investigation -- all of this is in concert with the subject matter as presented by our guest professional.   

For 2025, we were honored to host Leslie R. Walker, MD, Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and national expert on adolescent medicine. Addressing the unique health circumstances experienced by adolescents reveals specific risks attributable to substance use disorders, depression, suicide and gun violence. The content and discussion only further solidified our now more expansive embrace of the heterogeneity of those experiencing health inequities.  

In this issue, our first as the OHE newsletter, we are pleased to feature Dinee Simpson, MD, Chief Health Equity Executive at Northwestern Memorial HealthCare (NMHC) inclusive of the newly evolved Community Health Institute. Please review the vision of this new Institute as so clearly delineated by Dr. Simpson.  

And in a moment of professional and personal joy, we celebrate the opening of the Northwestern Medicine Bronzeville Outpatient Center. This first-ever planting of the purple flag on the South Side of Chicago in a facility intended for and designed by those who will be served is a celebration of the Northwestern Medicine ethos of “patients first,- all patients first”. Congratulations to Kimbra Bell, MD, as the inaugural medical director of Northwestern Medicine Bronzeville Outpatient Center.  

This office is not about the business of hoping for hope; rather we create opportunity; we lead with passion; and we hold firm our learned truism: “the absence of health in any one of us impacts the health of all of us.” In keeping with a guiding principle on this campus, better is our relentless quest.  

We hope you enjoy this newsletter.  

We’d love to hear from you. 

Clyde Yancy, MD, MSc
Vice Dean, Health Equity