The following is an edited transcript of an MDAdvantage podcast with Steve Adubato, PhD, and Mary M. O’Dowd, MPH, the Executive Director of Health Systems and Population Health Integration at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. Ms. O’Dowd is also an advisory member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey and the Institute for Women’s Leadership. She served as the New Jersey Commissioner of Health from 2011 to 2015. Ms. O’Dowd spoke to us about her current role at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, as well as her podcast On the Pandemic, physician stress and burnout, and her new book.
ADUBATO: Rutgers is such a large and complex university. Help us understand the work of the Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences program and your role in that.
O’DOWD: My connection to Rutgers is a long one. I’m a Douglass College graduate, and both my parents are Rutgers graduates. For me to come home to work at Rutgers was really special. Now, at Rutgers, I am bringing the healthcare system and the public health system together to work on real issues that affect people’s health in New Jersey.
The Chancellor, Dr. Brian Strom, and I work closely together on a lot of different things. Since I have been at Rutgers, it has been in a state of change, and so it’s been very exciting. In fact, the brand, Rutgers Health, was launched just recently, since I’ve been there. I actually serve on the Board of University Hospital in Newark in the position that is reserved for the university president, President Holloway, and we also have an extraordinarily interesting and dynamic relationship that’s new with RWJBarnabas Health. The connections that Rutgers Health and our practitioners and researchers have with a significant portion of the healthcare and hospital-based healthcare system in New Jersey is huge. What’s exciting about that, from a population health perspective, is that we’re in a position to start to move the needle on a big portion of our community—not just for those who are accessing healthcare services at the hospital, but also in the home. We’re starting to think innovatively about how we can make a difference. I hope to see more investments and exciting innovation in the coming years.
ADUBATO: Can you give us an example of some of the public health innovations you’ve been involved with so far?
O’DOWD: Back in 2017, when Dr. Steven Libutti came on board as the Director for the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey—the only NCI-designated cancer institute in New Jersey, he and I talked about how CINJ really needed to be more involved in community health and prevention around cancer. We were supported by the New Jersey Department of Health with a $2 million grant, and I led the design and launch of the ScreenNJ program, which has been in existence since then. The program focuses on reducing the disparities we see with lung and colorectal cancer in New Jersey by partnering with community health providers, our federally qualified health centers, as well as our hospitals and some of our local health departments and other partners that are involved in cancer prevention. We provide them with some additional tools and resources and collaboration so that they can get into communities and increase the rates of screenings so we can prevent cancer from getting too far along in the process. We’re also educating our communities about the effective screening tools that exist. That’s one of the examples of the kind of work that I’m doing at Rutgers.
ADUBATO: And you’re doing so much more at Rutgers, particularly with your podcast, On the Pandemic. You feature Rutgers experts, particularly in the healthcare field, talking about COVID-19. Tell us how the idea for the podcast came about.
O’DOWD: In 2019, when we started to see the emergence of COVID-19, we thought it was just in China. I was part of the response team that first started to look at what was going on globally to deal with the Rutgers decision-making process. When I was at the New Jersey Department of Health, I was involved in Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Irene and the Ebola outbreak and response, and so I had a lot of experience working in emergency events. I brought that experience to Rutgers, and was involved in supporting their decision-making process from the beginning, in bringing our students home from abroad and many other areas. I have been so extraordinarily proud of the way that Rutgers has responded during the pandemic. Not just from creating a safe environment for our faculty, staff and students on campus, but also for being very cutting edge in the research that was being done. That included public health research on how COVID-19 was affecting our healthcare workforce and clinical trials for the vaccine, as well as innovative scientific research like the development of the first saliva test that was available for COVID-19 testing. We did other things like graduate our students early so that they could respond to the pandemic during that first wave—our nurses, doctors and dentists. I have been extraordinarily proud, and it was from that point of pride that I made the recommendation that somebody should do a podcast to bring our expertise out into the community to really share how we were learning about this changing science. Like all good ideas, it turned around on me. I was elected the host of the On the Pandemic podcast.
ADUBATO: What’s it like to host the podcast?
O’DOWD: Well, I learn a lot. I think that’s the most fun. I have to do a lot of research, but I’m doing a lot of reading anyway, so when I see something that I think is really interesting, I want to highlight it. I get to meet the researchers and learn more about what they are doing, and I find that when I get in front of someone and I’m talking to them, I learn even more. To me, that’s really the fun part of it.
ADUBATO: That’s the sign of a great communicator—being curious, more than anything else. It’s about keeping people curious about what other people are doing and why that work matters.
“The information needs to be relevant so anyone can understand how to use these scientific tools to make themself healthier.”
O’DOWD: The other thing I like is something I’ve seen you do, too. You take something that’s kind of complicated and scientific, such as in the healthcare field or the public health field, and you have to figure out a way to talk about it so that not just other scientists understand it, but the general population, too. Particularly in this COVID-19 crisis, there have been a lot of changing situations and recommendations, which have been confusing. The information needs to be relevant so anyone can understand how to use these scientific tools to make themself healthier.
ADUBATO: A big theme of my work with MDAdvantage is physician burnout, focusing on wellness and managing stress and its connection to being a strong leader. I know that you and your colleagues at Rutgers are concerned about this, too. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about stress and burnout of healthcare workers, particularly in connection with being on the front lines of COVID-19?
O’DOWD: First of all, let me say that in my circle of family and friends, I have several physicians and nurses who have been fighting the pandemic from the beginning, and I see how tired they are. I see how burnt out they are. I think this is an extraordinary problem—not just for them, but for all of us—because we depend on them so much, and this has been a very long crisis. Oftentimes when we have thought about crises before, we have thought of something like a hurricane, which comes and goes fairly quickly, and then we recover from it. But with COVID-19, we’re still in it after all this time. That’s what makes the duration of this event so extraordinarily difficult for our healthcare providers.
I think the number one thing we can do is to be kind and supportive to our healthcare providers. They are going through a lot, just like we are. They have family and children and friends who have been sick from COVID-19, and they leave them to treat others. I believe that one of the things we really need to do—for everyone, but in particular for our healthcare workforce—is to focus on making mental health, behavioral health and resiliency services ubiquitous. Just like we think about mandating vaccines, we need to think about mandating behavioral health support and resiliency programs, because everyone would benefit from them. Right now, there’s still a little bit of a stigma associated with mental health services, and we can’t allow that to prevent people from using those resources. I have a good friend who’s an emergency room physician, and she started seeing and working with a therapist early on in the pandemic. She’s still burnt out and tired, but it has helped her so much in terms of managing through this.
ADUBATO: Do I remember correctly that you have a family connection to nursing?
O’DOWD: I do. My mother-in-law is a nurse, and my mother’s sister is a nurse practitioner. They are both working hard right now to care for people in very difficult circumstances.
ADUBATO: You’re the Coeditor of a new book, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Health Care and Public Health put out by Rutgers University Press. Tell us about the book and its message.
O’DOWD: Let me start by saying that I think leadership is such an important thing. I was part of the Institute for Women’s Leadership as an undergraduate scholar, so I’ve been thinking about and learning about leadership for a long time. I think, in the past year and a half, the different variations of leadership style and purpose that we have seen has been stark; one of the features of this book is not just looking at women who have had an incredible impact on health, whether from a public health, a scientific or a healthcare perspective, but it’s really about studying their leadership style. One of the most important themes of this book is how, when they got into a position of leadership, they used their leadership to empower others and to be the voice for other people who are less fortunate. We highlight several women who my Coeditor, Ruth Charbonneau, and I saw as population health practitioners, including physicians, nurses and a journalist. These are people who made a difference and an impact in the health of our society. They did it from so many different angles, but a primary theme is that they used their leadership and their voice to support and empower others who were less fortunate or didn’t have that power.
ADUBATO: On behalf of MDAdvantage, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
O’DOWD: Thank you, Steve. One of the things that I’ve observed about MDAdvantage over the course of my relationship with them—which has been long, over a decade—is that they’re pushing the envelope about how we can learn as a healthcare community and a public health community and about what we should be doing better. How can we improve our system of health? How can we improve the lives of our healthcare providers and the people that we serve, our patients and our clients? Early on, they were willing to take on some of the newer innovative-but-maybe-not-yet-proven ideas that we were pushing from a public health perspective and embed that into their educational resources. I really appreciated that about them. When I look back now, in retrospect, and read some of the material that they put out there, it was cutting edge, and it’s really nice to see that they were willing to support innovative thoughts. So often when we look at our traditional organizations, they’re a little hesitant to touch new issues.
