As a Black mother, Hope Williams-Burt always felt as if she had to fight to get her doctors to listen to her. One health care worker even criticized the way she spoke, telling her that she needed to articulate better.
But when Williams-Burt first sat down with pediatrician Dr. Dayna Long, co-founder of the BLOOM: Black Baby Equity Clinic, to discuss her daughter Mykylah’s breathing issues, her usual anxiety in health care settings immediately dissolved.
“I was talking to her and she just looked at me and asked, ‘How are you?’ ” Williams-Burt said. “She just had a conversation with me.”
BLOOM — an acronym for Black Love Opportunity & Outcome Improvement in Medicine Primary Care — is based at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. It is the first clinic in the Bay Area to provide Black families with baby and toddler care from a team of health care workers who share their racial identities and understand the social, cultural and racial challenges that Black families such as Williams-Burt’s face.
“When I go into this clinic, I don’t have anxiety; I don’t have stress,” Williams-Burt said. “My baby girl is now 14 months old and I’m still breastfeeding because I’m not stressed when I go into that space.”
Across the U.S., Black newborns are more than twice as likely as White newborns to die before they turn 1 year old. In the Bay Area, the disparities are particularly concerning. According to a 2017 report from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Black babies in the city were more than four times more likely to die before the age of 3 than those born into White or Asian families.