Mayor Jim Kenney has appointed Dr. Cheryl Bettigole as Health Commissioner. Bettigole has been serving as the interim commissioner of the city’s Department of Public Health since May, when former department head Dr. Thomas Farley resigned at the request of the mayor.
She is a board-certified family physician with a doctor of medicine degree from Thomas Jefferson University. She also holds a master’s of public health from Johns Hopkins University.
According to WHYY, before working at the Health Department, Bettigole saw patients at a Federally Qualified Health Center serving immigrants in southern New Jersey, and as a doctor and clinical director at the city’s health centers she treated patients for over a decade.
“Throughout her entire career, Dr. Bettigole has demonstrated a deep commitment to prioritizing equity, access, and prevention in public health,” Kenney said in a statement.
The Health Commissioner keeps racial equity as a priority for her new position. She plans to hire the city’s first chief racial equity officer and create a health equity plan for the Health Department.
You can read: Hospitals in Philadelphia face a blood shortage
Bettigole aims to increase access to primary care because it was clear how much easier it was during the pandemic for people to access health care when they had doctors they trusted.
In addition, she hopes to rewrite several of the city’s emergency planning documents, those for mass death events, another pandemic, or a toxin release, for example using an equity perspective.
“Unless we have a very, very intentional focus on equity before all else, the general forces of structural racism are such that the whole system pushes away from equity,” she said.
A lesson learned
Bettigole considers the real impact of those forces as a lesson learned from the pandemic. “It’s not that we didn’t understand how powerful those forces were, because we work in public health and you come up against that all the time. But the scope of that, and how much ingenuity and planning and sheer resources that takes, is probably the greatest thing we learned from the pandemic.”
Until her appointment as interim commissioner, she was director of the Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention for the Health Department. In that role, which she had held since 2015, Bettigole worked on the regulation of tobacco products and the establishment of a new injury prevention program focused on the prevention of gun violence, among other efforts.
Noticias Newswire
