Kristen Obiakor ’13 is in it for the kids. Whether they’re patients in her pediatric practice or prospective physicians in the pipeline programs she’s established across the country, kids are the “why” that keep Obiakor committed to providing care and advocating for health equity.
“In pediatrics, we are the foundation of health equity because of the fact that we create adults,” she says. “We ensure that our children can live out their fullest potentials.”
To accomplish this, Obiakor considers her patients’ full selves when providing care. As a National Clinician Scholar at the University of California–Los Angeles, she studies how the “social determinants of health” — factors like housing, income, education, and environment — influence wellness and how understanding these can help physicians provide more comprehensive care.
“Patients are not just their diagnosis,” she says. “Knowing that children who are marginalized by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic backgrounds often face higher morbidity and mortality rates has made my advocacy work inseparable from my duty as a pediatrician.”
Obiakor is especially interested in community-based interventions for achieving health equity. As a first-year medical student at Rush Medical College in Chicago, she was surprised to learn that the very neighborhoods that surrounded the hospital had some of the highest rates of chronic disease and lowest life expectancies in the city.
She responded by founding the West Side Walk for Wellness, an event that brought neighbors, faith leaders, law enforcement, and youth together with medical professionals to build trust, share resources, and celebrate health in community. The program, now called the Rush Walk for Wellness, is in its ninth year and has expanded to neighborhoods across Chicago and its suburbs.
“Wellness doesn’t just happen within the hospital walls,” Obiakor says. “It happens by getting outside into our communities [and] making sure that we understand those social determinants of health.”
Wellness also happens when patients see themselves reflected in their providers — but in a medical establishment that suffers from chronic underrepresentation of physicians from historically marginalized backgrounds, this isn’t always guaranteed. Obiakor’s prescription: the pipeline programs of which she is both a product and a success story.
Pipeline programs offer mentorship, resources, and immersive educational opportunities for students interested in a career in medicine. It was in one of these programs that Obiakor, the daughter of Nigerian and Jamaican immigrants, first met a physician who looked like her. That shared recognition propelled Obiakor through her undergraduate career at the UW, where she was a Powers-Knapp scholar (now called the Mercile J. Lee Scholars Program), and into her medical career.
“When we have young people who see physicians who share aspects of their identity, it changes what they believe is possible for their own futures,” she says.
Today, creating those same opportunities for aspiring physicians is just as much a part of Obiakor’s care practice as her work in the clinic. While a resident physician at Yale, she established the Medical Specialty Exposure Pipeline, which brings resident physicians to students in local communities to talk about their career pathways, their medical school experiences, and their continuing training in their specialties.
“You’re demystifying what medicine is,” Obiakor says. “You’re breaking down those barriers and you’re opening doors that have been closed for those who are historically minoritized within medicine.”
The power of these programs is evident not only in Obiakor’s respective success, but in the successes she shares in her practice every day: the joy of watching students work with dermatology residents to perform biopsies on bananas; the ease with which a child — and their parent — breathes after Obiakor lobbies their landlord to treat the mold in their home; the relaxation in a Black mother’s shoulders when Obiakor enters the exam room.
And where a clear path to success doesn’t already exist, Obiakor finds a way to pave that, too: “If I don’t see something, I’ll just create it.”
