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Baton Rouge Woman Receives $120,000 Health Leadership Award For Helping Transform Louisiana’s Primary Care System
BOSTON – Kristy Nichols grew up in the south around people she saw struggling financially and without access to adequate health care. Despite their own odds, through the foresight and determination of her family, Nichols was able to attend White Station Junior High and High School, a public school for gifted and talented students in Memphis. She later became one of the first college graduates in her family.
During graduate school at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette she began working with the local United Way on community planning projects and realized that she had a gift for organizing and mobilizing poor and vulnerable people to act on their own behalf.
In 2002, at the young age of 28, Nichols took over the Bureau of Primary Care and Rural Health in Baton Rouge, an organization struggling to adequately support the state’s primary care needs. In just four years, under her leadership and in the face of budget cuts, the bureau has improved the health status of rural and underserved residents and increased the entire system’s capacity to provide needed services.
Nichols played an instrumental role in increasing the number of federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics in Louisiana by almost 50 percent. As a result, in 2005 the state went from the bottom of the list of those federally qualified health centers receiving federal funding to third in the nation.
It is for her work at the bureau that Nichols being honored as one of 10 outstanding individuals from across America chosen to receive the 2006 Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Program award.
Nichols worked with Leslie Lee and other Tensas Parish residents to open a clinic that would serve the poverty stricken area, which had been without a hospital for almost 20 years. With Nichols’ help Lee and others successfully applied for federal funding and opened a health care facility there. “In this case,” said Lee, who lives on a farm with three children (two with special needs), “what Kristy Nichols did was bring primary care to a region that is the equivalent of a third world country.”
“The efforts of Kristy and the team of employees she leads continue to impress me time and time again,” said Frederick Cerise, M.D., M.P.H., Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. “Evidence of her excellence in leadership, ingenuity and dedication to the medically underserved is demonstrated by the work she does.”
“Last summer’s devastating hurricanes brought into focus for all Americans the gaping holes in this country’s safety net,” said Catherine Dunham, Ed.D., Program Director, Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Program. “It reinforced what we know to be true; that local leaders taking the initiative are really the first and best responders whether the issue is access to care or youth development in underserved areas.”
The program awards $1.2 million each year to health leaders who have surmounted personal and other obstacles to help Americans gain access to heath care and social services. Nichols and this year’s other health leaders were honored at a June 21 event at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey. She will receive $105,000 to further the work of her program and a $15,000 personal award.
Nichols was chosen from more than 300 people nominated this year. Since 1992, the program has distributed 140 awards in 47 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Those chosen are nominated by civic leaders, health professionals, government representatives and others inspired by their efforts to provide essential health services to their communities. This year’s award winners represent urban and rural areas of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, and the District of Columbia.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on the pressing health and health care issues facing our country. As the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change. For more than 30 years the Foundation has brought experience, commitment, and a rigorous, balanced approach to the problems that affect the health and health care of those it serves. When it comes to helping Americans lead healthier lives and get the care they need, the Foundation expects to make a difference in your lifetime. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org.
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