Hasbro Children's Hospital chosen to help advance health equity

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WJAR) — Hasbro Children's Hospital is participating in the "Accelerating Child Health Care Transformation" initiative.

Rhode Island's only children's hospital, chosen as one of only 12 pediatric practices in the country in this initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson.

These 12 practices will work with the Center for Health Care Strategies to come up with a road map to make pediatric health care more equitable.

"Certainly, with the death of George Floyd, as well as the national recognition of social unrest, we were able to have conversations that simply weren't happening before. It was an awakening for some people in the country," said Dr. Olutossin Ojugbele, who is not only a pediatrician at Hasbro Children's Hospital.

Ojugbele is pushing for change. She led the application process for Hasbro.

"It definitely speaks to who we are as an institution, as an urban medical center caring for over 10,000 children in Rhode Island and serving predominately a low income and minority population," she said.

"The families have to be the center of it," added Dr. Carol Lewis, medical director of Hasbro's Pediatric Primary Care and director of the Refugee Health Program.

She said that's one of the main goals of this collaboration.

"Implicit bias is not always obvious. And until we hear what our families need and want from us, we won't be as effective as we can be," said Lewis.

"We plan on surveying our patients and families to hear about their experiences and what they need in order to provide good health," said Ojugbele.

"We also want to educate our faculty and staff about what being anti-racist means and how to do that. We also want to change our cultural climate and diversify our workforce to actually represent the people we serve. We really hope, as part of this initiative, that we can hear from practices across the country that serve many different types of patients and hope to create a standard of care for not only our patients, but all of those pediatric patients in the country," she added.