Women's Healthcare & Wellness Collective

For African and African-diaspora women in clinical practice, public-health research, hospital administration, and the wellness-adjacent professions. Clinicians, public-health practitioners, and wellness builders in a working collective.

Membership includes MDs, DOs, NPs, RNs, midwives, PAs, PharmDs, dentists, optometrists, occupational and physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, mental-health clinicians at master's and doctoral level, public-health practitioners with MPH and DrPH credentials, hospital and health-system administrators, and the wellness-adjacent builders — yoga teachers with clinical-adjacent practices, Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners, doulas, lactation consultants, certified personal trainers and dietitians working alongside clinical teams. The wider tent reflects the actual breadth of African and African-diaspora women's professional work in healthcare and wellness.

What we talk about. Clinical practice. The day-to-day of patient care across practice settings. The decisions we are making with patients in real time. The cases that have stayed with us. The clinical challenges that have shaped our practice. The professional-development questions across our specialties.

Hospital and health-system administration. The members in administrative leadership. The board work. The physician-leadership pipeline. The chief medical officer track. The hospital politics and the system-level decisions.

Public-health practice. The community-health work in specific cities and regions. The maternal-mortality advocacy. The chronic-disease management programs. The HIV and infectious-disease work. The mental-health advocacy at population level. The health-equity research and intervention.

Specialty-specific conversations. OB-GYN, internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, surgery, emergency medicine, anesthesiology, radiology, pathology, dermatology, ophthalmology, and other specialties. The subspecialty conversations within each.

Starting a practice. The clinic-establishment work. The administrative setup. The billing and insurance credentialing. The hiring. The relationship-with-hospital negotiations. The decisions about private-practice versus employed-physician status.

Wellness practice. The yoga, meditation, somatic practice, and complementary work that members are building alongside or in coordination with clinical teams. The evidence base for different practices. The honest acknowledgment of what is supported by research and what is not. The relationship between clinical and wellness practice in members' work.

The patient-care politics. The specific bias literature on how Black women patients are treated across healthcare. The way members navigate patient-care decisions when they are sitting on both sides — as clinicians and as Black women who have been patients in the same system. The patient-advocacy work we do for our communities.

Mid-career transitions. Members moving from clinical to administrative roles, from clinical to research, from clinical to industry, from clinical to global-health work. The reverse moves. The combinations across all of these.

Burnout and the long arc of clinical careers. The literature on healthcare-professional burnout, with specific attention to women of color physician burnout rates. The therapy work. The community we have built around staying in the work without being destroyed by it.

Cadence: a weekly thread. A monthly long-form thread on a clinical or structural topic. A monthly virtual session with a guest from within or outside the membership. Regional in-person meetups. An annual convening.

Rules. HIPAA in spirit. No specific patient identifiers. Confidentiality on internal hospital and health-system matters. No clinical advice on specific patient scenarios beyond what a hallway curbside would appropriately cover.

What we are: the working group for African and African-diaspora women across healthcare and wellness professions. The room for the clinical decisions, the administrative challenges, the public-health advocacy, and the long arc of careers in this work. We hold each other through it.

The subgroup structure inside the network is built around the breadth of the membership. Primary care, with separate channels for internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, and OB-GYN. Surgical specialties. Psychiatry and behavioral health. Hospital medicine and emergency medicine. Subspecialties — cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, hematology-oncology, infectious disease, nephrology, neurology, pulmonology, rheumatology, and the others. Outpatient specialties. Procedural specialties. Research-focused members. Public-health practitioners. Health-system administrators. Wellness-adjacent practitioners with clinical-aligned practices.

The patient-advocacy work. Several members coordinate informal patient-advocacy functions for their communities. The relatives and friends and church-members who reach out asking which doctor to see and which hospital to choose. The way some of us have structured this work — the boundaries we maintain, the formal referrals we make, the role we play and the role we decline. The work of being a clinical professional in a community that has historically had limited access to trusted clinical guidance.

The research-participation conversation. The slow rebuilding of trust between Black communities and clinical-research infrastructure after the well-documented failures of the past. The members of this network who are themselves researchers running clinical studies and who carry the responsibility of doing this work with integrity. The members who are clinicians making recruitment decisions for their own patients. The members who advocate for representative trial enrollment as part of their public-health work. The shared commitment that research participation should be informed, consensual, and equitably designed.

The continental-practice track. Members practicing in African countries and members in the diaspora who engage in episodic continental practice through medical missions or specific consulting arrangements. The honest conversations about medical-missions ethics — the difference between extractive short-term work and durable partnership with local clinical systems. The specific work members have built with continental hospitals and medical schools that has been useful and sustainable.

The teaching and mentorship work. Members across the training stages who are teaching the next generation. The pre-med advisors. The medical-school faculty. The residency-program faculty. The continuing-medical-education work. The formal mentorship structures and the informal ones. The way teaching feeds back into our own clinical practice.

Cadence inside the network: a daily clinical-questions channel that operates as professional consultation for our own development. A weekly long-form thread on a clinical or structural topic. A monthly virtual session — sometimes a clinical talk from a senior member, sometimes a guest from outside the network. Quarterly regional in-person meetups. An annual convening that brings the full membership together.