This episode is another impactful episode where Dr. Graham along with his guest, Dr. Bradley talked about racial capitalism in the medical field and how people of diverse communities and backgrounds are not being served well by the healthcare system because the system was made for a white cis-het man.

Topics Covered:

• Changing the healthcare system at a community level to better serve
• How lived experiences of folks of color and other diverse communities are not centered and the systems are not built to identify their specific needs
• Racial Capitalism
• How there is a disservice to the community when the people in power do not listen and hear to provide what the community really needs

Guest Bio:

Cory D. Bradley, PhD, MSW-MPH holds space as a healer, guide, research scientist and legacy social worker convening dialogue critical to (re)existence.  He embraces opportunities to advance healing projects as a public intellectual using tools of social science, health equity research, and collective action.

Dr. Bradley earned his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2019.  He is currently studying as a postdoc at Washington University School of Medicine developing perspectives that situate health equity and anti-racism in the translation of health interventions through implementation with communities. 

Dr. Bradley’s interests span a range of topics including: the sexual health and well-being of Black gay men, stakeholder engagement and mobilization as strategies of power, and diverse implementation science projects framing equitable implementation of health interventions in public health settings.  

Time Stamps/Quotes

0:00   What she said was I don't think that we want equity within an unchanged society. So the question for me becomes, can medical service ever be equitable, if the rest of your freedoms are restricted? So what is the responsibility of health systems to participate in an emancipatory liberatory battle with the folks who are to help suffering folks?

9:00 US healthcare system is very much a capitalistic system. So yes, what she had to do was really spin that listen, this works, we will reduce our Medicare spending cost. Because whether people know this or not, if you get readmitted for the same diagnosis, Medicare does not pay for the second visit. So hospitals have to pretty much eat those costs. So here - what she did as a selling pitch to the healthcare system was saying this loud, if you intervene at the community level, and we keep these people from coming back for the same thing every two to three weeks. And now it's six months to a year, you're actually going to save by putting this together. So you know, one might have arguments about that. But I think in speaking the language of the people you need to influence that's absolutely a smart thing she did. 

10:42 I think the problem is that our interventions and our approaches, and our deliveries, do not engage folks at the spaces where they live, the realities, right, those kinds of realities. And we need to do a much better job. When I say we, I mean, our systems must do a better job of accommodating those realities, engaging those realities and those lived experiences, and then finding the way that we fine-tune the interventions in the science, the science in the making, with communities and individuals paying attention to all the different kinds of contexts. 

11:17 I think the problem is that our interventions and our approaches, and our deliveries, do not engage folks at the spaces where they live, the realities, right, those kinds of realities and we need to do a much better job. When I say we, I mean, our systems must do a better job of accommodating those realities, engaging those realities and those lived experiences, and then f