UHF is proud to present the 2023 Health Care Leadership Award to Mart T. Bassett, MD, for her trailblazing work in advancing equity and social justice in health care and for ably leading both New York City and New York State through multiple health crises.
Mary T. Bassett, MD, grew up in Washington Heights, where her parents instilled in her an activist spirit and a mighty sense of purpose.
Over a more than four-decade career spanning academia, government, and nonprofit work—including as commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York State health commissioner, and a member of the medical faculty at the University of Zimbabwe—she has used that purpose, along with her medical expertise and leadership acumen, to advance social justice in health care and confront the systemic forces impeding it.
In November 2015, Mary gave a TEDMED talk entitled “Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice.” In the video, which has more than 1.3 million views, she proclaimed that “our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change."
In all her work, Mary has done just that.
After earning a bachelor’s degree cum laude from Harvard University and a medical degree from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, she did her residency at Harlem Hospital from 1979 to 1983.
While she enjoyed treating patients, Mary ultimately decided she could do more good outside the hospital walls. “I worked clinically for years and in many different settings, including in Zimbabwe, but I never saw people sicker than the patients I looked after at Harlem Hospital in the 1980s,” she says. “It was clear that, as committed and hard working as we were in the hospital, what people faced outside the hospital was what was sending them back to us.”
After earning a Masters of Public Health from the University of Washington in Seattle, Mary accepted a position as a junior lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe. As part of her work, she developed a range of AIDS prevention interventions and helped run a rural health program that trained doctors. “I tell people that everything I learned about public health I learned in Zimbabwe,” she says.
“I really learned how quickly you can advance health when you have a political leadership that’s committed to it.”
After serving as associate director of health equity at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Southern Africa Office, Mary was appointed as deputy commissioner of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 2002. From 2009 to 2014, she served as program director for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative and Child Well-Being Prevention Program.
During her stint as New York City health commissioner from 2014 to 2018, Mary was widely credited with leading successful responses to health crises involving Ebola, Legionnaires’ disease, and the Zika virus. The New York Times praised her for developing “neighborhood health centers to make health and social services more accessible to poor New Yorkers.”
What makes Mary most proud of her time leading the city’s health department was building a lasting culture of health equity and racial justice that has made the department more effective in serving all New Yorkers. This meant focusing on program and policy development as well as internal culture and diversity.
When she took the helm, the department’s leadership team included no Black or Latine individuals. As a result of Mary’s efforts, this changed. But it wasn’t just the leadership team—she wanted everyone to identify a way in which they could advance equity. “I remember the IT people came up with an idea about how to overcome missing data on race and ethnicity through pulling it from different places,” she says.
Externally, she pushed the department to address the structural racism driving troubling gaps in health between white New Yorkers and communities of color. “I was determined that we acknowledged that the people who bear the burden of ill health have to be part of the solution of improving their health,” she said.
From late 2021 to December 2022, Mary led New York State’s response to the COVID pandemic and other crises as the state commissioner of health.
From 2018 to 2021, in between her leadership as city and state health commissioner, she served as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights in the department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; she returned to this role after resigning as state health commissioner in 2022.
For her trailblazing work in advancing equity and social justice in health care and for ably leading both New York City and New York State through multiple health crises, United Hospital Fund is proud to present Mary Basset, MD, with its 2023 Health Care Leadership Award.
