How a Sarasota health clinic is breaking down barriers to care in black communities.

“It’s heartbreaking” when people tell Dr. Lisa Merritt they don’t trust doctors.

“I have to laugh at them and say, ‘You’re going to tell me that, and I’m a doctor,'” says Merritt, founder and executive director of the Multicultural Health Institute (MHI) in Sarasota. Florida, however, feels comfortable to be honest with me, because that’s how people really feel.

Merritt has dedicated her work to improving access to public health resources for minority communities, and as a black physician, she sees first-hand the barriers to care.

In the year She founded MHI in California in 1995 with a team of doctors and community advocates.

In the year In 2006, MHI’s headquarters moved to Sarasota, after Merritt moved there to attend to her mother’s care following a cancer diagnosis.

Matthew Peddie

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WUSF Public Media

The MHI office Merritt shares with an intern is around the corner from the Newtown Volunteer Career Relations Center. The walls of the office are lined with certificates, brightly colored posters and newspaper clippings highlighting Merit and the institution’s work.

Before the outbreak, MHI held health fairs offering free health screenings for things like high blood pressure and diabetes. Merritt led a long-term study of health care in Newtown, Sarasota’s historically black neighborhood. And the institute trains volunteers called community navigators who connect them to health care resources, from prescriptions to housing and food assistance.

When Covid-19 hit, MHI responded by monitoring and organizing the spread of the disease Injection drives.

In the year In a video posted on the group’s Facebook page from March 2021, Merritt spoke with two women through an open car window outside a church in Bradenton, on the Florida Gulf Coast north of Sarasota, discussing vaccinations.

“How do you feel mentally after the second dose?” she asked.

“He’s relieved. I’m always in the community,” one of them replied.

Emerging immunization clinics like this one were Merritt’s way of bridging the gap in health care.

Merritt said MHI looked at the data to show how Covid was affecting communities differently in different zip codes.

In North Sarasota, where the population is predominantly black and Latinx, they found positivity rates were higher than in neighboring communities.

“These are essential workers,” Merritt said. “These people cannot sit at home and work from home. These were multi-generational homes,” he said.

She said she understands why there is a lack of trust in health care providers from a community that has experience with an isolated health system.

While vaccinations are being sent to restricted communities and people’s friends, it has done little to instill more trust in the power structure that rules people’s lives.

But access to information, testing and vaccines are bigger barriers than trust, she said.

Overcoming those barriers means working with public health agencies and other partners to make vaccines available in the community.

“Then on Saturdays and Sundays we would have hundreds of people at the church or community center. And we were able to level the playing field perfectly.

In addition to conducting pop-up clinics, informational and educational sessions, Merritt mentors future healthcare leaders at MHI.

Former interns have gone on to become lawyers, doctors, artists…but all have an interest in public health, she said.

“The pandemic opened my eyes to the many failures in all areas of public health,” said former intern Ormond Derrick.

Derek, who has a bachelor’s degree in political science and international health from New College of Florida in Sarasota, developed a COVID-19 access guide in English and Spanish for MHI, and helped people find things they needed, such as information on testing sites, or pulse oximeters to measure blood-oxygen levels. How to use.

“It’s a very simple interventional device that saves lives,” Derek said of the pulse oximeter. “I especially saved my family’s life because I will use the same skills I learned at MHI to help them when they are diagnosed with Covid.”

According to Derek, MHI shows how the health care system should be work. He called it “a wonderful model of how to do health care and health equity and how to replicate it no matter what.”

MHI intern Olympia Fulcher says working at MHI has given her a different way of thinking about public health.

“You don’t need to be a doctor or an epidemiologist to make a difference in public health,” they said.

Fulcher, who holds a degree in computer science, has been developing an app so that community members without internet access can access important information about Covid-19 on their phones.

“And that’s what really solidified it for me, even though I’m just crunching numbers all day, it’s really making an impact in the community,” he said.

Fulcher described Merritt as “one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. She was a big influence on me. Huge.

Derek echoed this sentiment. I think I’ve found her to be the closest thing to an angel, but of course she’s an extraordinary person at the end of the day.

Merritt says her own career has been shaped by great role models. Now she’s paying it forward and helping shape the next generation of public health advocates.

“I’m grateful to have had amazing models and to be part of my link in the chain. And I hope to inspire other young people.

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