Reed Tuckson joined Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health, for a public conversation in honor of Black History Month on Monday afternoon, covering his career path and today’s pressing public health threats.
Tuckson has led multiple public health organizations, serving in a range of healthcare administrative positions. He is co-convener of the Coalition For Trust In Health and Science, was co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID and was executive vice president and chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group.
Growing up, Tuckson’s mother was a visiting nurse in Washington, D.C., where he saw her “going into the poorest parts of the towns and (saving) people’s lives,” he told the audience. This eventually inspired him to go into public health.
During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Tuckson worked at Veterans Affairs, where he diagnosed multiple patients with heart disease. “All of a sudden, all the excitement of what I had been trained to do just seemed a little suboptimal because these people were going to die from preventable illness,” he said.
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Tuckson was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Penn, a program which allowed him to take classes at the Wharton School and explore other facets of healthcare.
“It was the beginning of the movement to train clinicians with non-clinical skills to be able to change the world,” Tuckson said.
Tuckson also discussed his work as co-founder of Black Coalition Against COVID. He noted that in the early days of the pandemic, he collaborated with a wide range of community stakeholders, organizations and academics even with a lack of funding.
“What we learned is with almost no money, with no bureaucracy and no infrastructure, you can just do it,” he said. “Don’t wait for permission, just get it done.”
“You didn’t need money (or) bureaucracy, but you did need vision and leadership, and that did not come out of nowhere,” Jha responded. “So thank you for making it happen.”
As a current co-convener for the Coalition For Trust in Health and Science — which is composed of about 90 organizations — Tuckson also said that he aims to “bring together the entire health ecosystem for the first time in history.”
The conversation ended with a look towards future public health threats for Black people in America.
“The most important challenges going forward for Black America and healthcare (are) going to be misinformation, disinformation and distrust,” Tuckson said, noting that these are also the most important issues for America generally.
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Ryan Doherty is a Section Editor covering faculty, higher education and science & research. He is a sophomore concentrating in chemistry and economics who likes to partially complete crosswords in his free time.
