Uché Blackstock

Uché Blackstock is an American emergency physician and former associate professor of emergency medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. She is the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, which has a primary mission to engage with healthcare and related organizations around bias and racism in healthcare with the goal of mobilizing for health equity and eradicating racialized health inequities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackstock used social media to share her experiences and concerns as a physician working on the front lines and on racial health disparities and inequities exposed by the pandemic. She is best known for her work illuminating racial health inequities and her media appearances speaking about the COVID-19 pandemic. Blackstock became a Yahoo! News Medical Contributor in June 2020.

Early life and education Blackstock is originally from Brooklyn. She grew up in Crown Heights alongside her fraternal twin sister, Oni Blackstock. Their mother, Dale Gloria Blackstock, studied medicine at Harvard University During her practice, she specialized in nephrology and served as president of an organization for Brooklyn's black women doctors. When Blackstock and her sister graduated from Harvard Medical School in 2005, they became the first Black mother-daughter legacies to do so.

Career Medicine In July 2010, Blackstock was appointed as an assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine, where she held a simultaneous position as an emergency physician. At the time, fewer than two percent of American physicians were black women. She has called for academic medical centers to better appreciate and rectify the impact of racism in healthcare. Her mother's challenging life experiences and death, along with the racial health inequities that Blackstock witnessed as a physician, were the inspiration to start her own organization. In March 2018, Blackstock established Advancing Health Equity, an organization focused on partnering with healthcare and related organizations to address racial health inequities. She believes that a diverse workforce, and one where everyone feels valued and respected, is essential for quality patient care.

COVID-19 Blackstock currently works part-time at several urgent care centers in Brooklyn. The centers usually deal with minor conditions, but during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Blackstock noticed that patients were presenting with the symptoms of coronavirus disease. She used social media to describe the challenges that she had getting testing for her patients, especially "when celebrities are getting tested with ease and quick turnaround times". She became concerned about how the coronavirus pandemic would affect black patients. In an interview with Slate, Blackstock remarked, "When I heard about doctors in Italy having to ration ventilators and then the incredibly likely possibility that that is going to happen here, my first thought was so many Black people are going to die."

Selected publications Why Black Doctors Like Me are Leaving Faculty Positions in Academic Medical Centers What the COVID-19 Pandemic Means for Black Americans Black Communities were Essentially Already Sick Before Coronavirus: Pandemic Highlights Preexisting Condition with Health Care and Race Community Health Workers are Essential in the Crisis. We Need More of Them

Two words no parent of a sick child should have to hear: ‘At capacity Say her name: Dr. Susan Moore Alvin Bragg’s unjust prosecution: Tracy McCarter should be freed Mother, daughters, doctors. Affirmative action at Harvard makes a generational ripple in improving black health care

Selected honors and awards 2022 NAACP Brooklyn Chapter's 2022 Valiant Service Award 2021 American Medical Women's Association's Presidential Award Her fraternal twin sister, Oni, is a primary care physician, researcher, and the former Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of HIV for New York City.