Tag Archives: Baltimore

September 7, 2020 · 9:03 am

“Is this your field hospital?”

“Is this your field hospital?”

This question is the reason I wear a tie to all our COVID testing events. I want people to know where they can direct complaints or concerns. I walked over to the gentleman who asked the question and steeled myself for “constructive feedback.”

It has been six months of almost exclusively COVID. Since mid-winter and my taking the role of Hospital Incident Command’s “Community Liaison,” the population health job has taken on a very specific focus as COVID has become the latest of the threats to the health for our community.

We started in early March by planning for hospital COVID testing and working with community health on food distribution after the schools closed and many of the children in the community lost access to several of their daily meals. By mid-month, a group of us from the two largest medical systems in our city met with the State Health Department and were directed to construct and operate a FEMA field hospital in the convention center. Continue reading →

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March 31, 2019 · 2:17 pm

Fifth Anniversary

The grand essentials of happiness are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.  Thomas Chalmers

Five years ago today we retired from the Army.

I say “we” because it was a journey for all of us: my wife who as a young girl decided she never wanted to marry a soldier or a doctor, my children who without complaint endured the range of challenges and sometimes the trauma of the moves and military life as well as having a dad who was not around as much as he wishes he could have been, and for our extended family whose children and grandchildren spent more than a decade six time zones away from them. I had to visit three different floral shops to find 30 red roses for my wife that day; one for every year we served together as a family.

We were fortunate right away to be offered a full-time faculty position in pediatrics at the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda by my life-long mentor, CAPT (Retired) Ildy Katona. Dr. Katona is a clinician and researcher whom I met as a young resident three decades earlier. We were blessed to be spared the angst of deciding “What’s next?” I treasure my academic appointment in Pediatrics and Military and Emergency Medicine at “American’s Medical School” to this day.

A year after retirement my wife noticed a position listed on an Internet jobs-board at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore where my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter lived. I applied, and six months later started work for the medical center as an executive in population health. I wasn’t exactly sure what population health even was, but sensed that what we had experienced in our integrated military health care system began to approach it. It’s safe to say that the definition continues to evolve as the state and national healthcare landscape changes.

In West Baltimore we have found Chalmer’s grand essentials. This is the steepest professional learning curve I have ever been on. The “something to do” provides lessons in leadership and life (including failure) on an almost daily basis. It is a new role, a new “rank,” new organizational culture and system, a new model of healthcare finance and delivery and a new patient population. My wife would say the same thing about her position as a school social worker.

We love the work. (Well most of the time.) But mostly, we love the people we have met. They have welcomed us into their church, their neighborhood, their community, city and civic organizations. After what seemed like a lifetime of working for and serving with service members, we have found new friends and colleagues. They are our “something to love.”

As I have written here before, working in Sierra Leone in the winter of 2014 was a “red pill moment” for me when Dr. Paul Farmer challenged us to consider that the mortality of Ebola was due at least in part to health care disparity. The uprising in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray happened two months after I returned. Our nation’s attention was (too briefly) turned towards the stark examples of health care disparity in both rural and urban America. There are few better examples of this in the United States than our city, where disparity and inequity were engineered by what can only be called racist laws and practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But we have “something to hope for.” I tell people routinely that we have not been here long enough not to be optimistic. I meet men and women almost weekly who have dedicated their lives to righting these wrongs and advocating for those who have been oppressed and dispossessed. Our medical systems are awakening to the idea that health is more than the absence of disease and that health care includes things we have historically ignored: employment, housing, food security, transportation, education and literacy. I see it in the eyes of the medical students, residents, nurses and other professionals at our medical center and across the city. They get it. There is hope.

My mother taught me as a boy that there was a difference between joy and happiness. She told me that happiness is a transient feeling, but that “Joy is a decision.” Joy is the decision to view the past honestly but without regret, the present with openness and zeal, and the future with hope.

Chalmer’s grand essentials of happiness are really then the grand essentials of joy: something to do, to love and to hope for.

We knew them well in our decades of military service.
We are blessed to have found them again in our new home.

Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front   https://henryv43.wordpress.com/

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July 4, 2017 · 10:24 am

Learning Leadership in the City

Ten TwelveOn a clear, breezy summer Saturday morning in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood of Baltimore, 10:12 Sports Director Jeff Thompson speaks to a young player about character in the context of a flag-football game. In the background, the Ravens and the Bengals play the fifth game of their season.

In this neighborhood, 60% children live below the poverty level, 80% of households with children under 18 are female-headed, unemployment is 17% and a quarter of kids never finish high school. The field where the young men play is half a mile from the scene of the uprising and violence surrounding the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

This is the neighborhood where Jeff Thompson and his volunteers work with young men teaching the fundamentals of character and leadership from a Christian perspective. The lessons are framed against the backdrop of a flag-football league that also employees local youth on weekends as referees, linesmen, and statisticians.

Character is the foundation of almost any leadership model. The ability to “lead self” is crucial before one can attempt to apply almost any other leader competency. There’s much that a developing leader can read about the importance of character and no shortage of books on the subject. But no book can teach what we learn from credible mentors who serve as examples and who listen to understand.

Albert Schweitzer said, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.” Leadership guru Michael Useem took that same idea one step further: “Leadership is best learned from example and best communicated through example.”

Still a relative newcomer to Baltimore, I have joined the search for the magic, missing ingredients that once applied will cure the city’s woes. I know already that there isn’t any single thing. But on this Saturday morning these young men – in the context of a community who loves and cares for them and who holds them accountable for their actions – were experiencing the closest thing I have found to a foundational first step.

“Leadership is character in motion” (Les Csorba).

For these young men on any given Saturday there is more in motion than the football and the players on the field.

Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front      https://henryv43.wordpress.com/

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February 13, 2017 · 6:24 am

The sound of the guns

I probably shouldn’t look at social media during church. But honestly, I was just opening the Bible App on my phone (!) The local “Nextdoor” link on my email was a post from someone living nearby: “Neighborhood too dangerous.” The author wrote, “We were talking about how annoying it is that we cannot walk outside without fear of being held up at gunpoint and it might be time to move to a safer place…”

It has been something of a bad week for our neighborhood. Someone was held up and robbed on the street I walk to work and a young man was shot a few blocks from our home. But none of this is new to West Baltimore or to the city where more than three dozen people have been killed since New Years. Perhaps it was just a little too close to home.

The post made me think of our pastor.

He was born and raised in Baltimore and despite growing up in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods in a single parent home he has a college degree and is among the best read men I know. He had every reason and every opportunity to move away from the conditions in a city that Hobbes would likely agree are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

But he didn’t leave. Instead he studied, trained and prayed and with his wife planted a church in West Baltimore within a mile of the highest density of gun violence in the city. He was with the line of pastors at the uprising after the events surrounding the death of Freddie Gray two years ago this spring. He leads by example in the city of his birth that he could easily and justifiable have left behind.

This morning I was stuck by what drew me to his leadership and to this church.

We spent thirty years in the Army where among the highest virtues was the willingness to run toward the sound of the guns.

Now we are serving with this leader and these brothers and sisters who have chosen to do the exact same thing – literally and figuratively – on some of our nation’s most dangerous streets.

A couple commented at a dinner recently that it is not uncommon in our neighborhood to hear gunshots at night. These men and women whose church meets in a local public school; who are led by a courageous pastor and his wife are far more familiar with the sound than we are.

Perhaps I am drawn to this leader by the same qualities I have long recognized in those with whom I served in uniform:

True leaders run toward the sound of the guns.

We have found a community and leaders who live this.

And it feels a lot like home.

Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front      https://henryv43.wordpress.com/

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May 6, 2015 · 10:15 am

Baltimore: Another Red Pill?

The 2014 Ebola outbreak was a “red-pill moment” for the world.  Ebola is a terrible disease that broke out in the worst possible place and has only been controlled through the herculean, heroic efforts of the local national and international communities. The young nations of Sub-Saharan Africa have some of the most fragile healthcare systems in the world. Save the Children’s report “A Wake-up Call” brings the disparity into focus.  The report suggests that it would take $86/year to provide minimum essential services. In 2012 the governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone spent $9, $20, and $16 per person/year respectively on healthcare, while the US spent $4,126 and Norway $7,704. Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Perhaps this year with the rise of globalization we recognized that failing or overwhelmed healthcare systems anywhere are a threat to health everywhere.

In The Matrix (1999) Morpheus warned Neo of the risks of seeing the world as you wish it to be instead of seeing it as it really is. “Taking the red pill” has become a popular cultural reference for swallowing the sometimes painful truth of reality.

As many mavens have observed on both sides of the argument, the lessons we must draw from Baltimore cannot stop at the need for police reform. The stark statistics are also arresting: an African-American baby born in Baltimore between 2006 and 2008 had a significantly shortened life expectancy compared to a white baby born during the same period (70.2 vs. 76.2 years). The African-American baby was twice as likely to be born at low birth weight (15.1% vs. 7.4%) and was nine times more likely to die before the age of one. Nine times. Baltimore is emblematic of all our American cities including our Nation’s capital, where the death rate for poor children is similar to that of children in El Salvador or Cambodia.

We have a choice. We can continue the rancor and continue writing things to be read by those who agree with us; blaming each other while we do nothing.

Or we can move toward recognition and admit: Something is terribly wrong. Someone must be wrong. Perhaps, just perhaps… we are all wrong about something. Continue reading →

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