Dear friend,

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As summer draws to a close, I hope you had a chance to relax and recharge with family and friends. When I started at the Disparities Solutions Center, I was 7 months pregnant with my firstborn. This week, I am taking my oldest daughter to her first year at Bryant University in RI. It feels like health disparities has graduated from high school and is now going to college!

In many ways, this field continues to grow and evolve like my daughter. More and more organizations are understanding the importance of a health equity office to support and center this work. Recently, the Pediatric Health Equity Collaborative (PHEC) published a paper in the Health Equity journal, “Establishing a Health Equity Office: The Importance of Recentering Equity.”

Some key takeaways for ensuring the success of a health equity office:

• The history of the office is important and has the potential to determine the office’s scope of work and sphere of influence.

• A health equity office can provide crosscutting organizational direction, stability, and execution of equity efforts, reducing the efforts of siloing.

• High-level leadership buy-in provides time and financial resources.

• A health equity office should be centrally involved in the collection, analysis, and reporting of equity-focused metrics.

PHEC is an outgrowth of our Disparities Leadership Program and is comprised of 12 organizations working to establish best practices and lessons learned in a pediatric care setting. I’ve had the good fortune of working with this group since we first gathered as a group back in Nashville, TN in 2013. This is a group of dedicated clinicians, researchers and administrators who are passionate about this work and were willing to work together without any funding. It is what keeps me in this work, meeting colleagues like them who inspire me and are part of my community. We have to continue to support each other and share our best practices so others doing this hard work don’t have to re-invent the wheel!

In closing, I wish you a wonderful last days of summer before Dunkin’ debuts all the fall flavors in their coffee and donuts!

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Aswita Tan-McGrory, MBA, MSPH

Director