When President Obama selected Dr. Regina Benjamin to be his Surgeon General, he chose a rural family doctor who had had spent her entire career caring for the poor and uninsured. As the founder of the Bayou Clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama (the shrimping village featured in the movie, Forrest Gump), Dr. Benjamin continues a career dedicated to underserved communities. To serve patients “too poor for insurance and too rich for Medicaid.” Dr. Benjamin created a community-based, integrated and prevention-focused system of care that became a model for serving low income communities. Legendary for accepting buckets of oysters as payment, she also mortgaged her own home to rebuild the clinic after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Benjamin’s initiatives demonstrate what we can learn from her clinic as a microcosm for larger healthcare delivery systems. She blends heartwarming patient care stories from the Bayou, current policy innovations that are improving outcomes across the Gulf states region, and the national perspective of a former Surgeon General in this informative talk.

Regina Benjamin is a national leader in preventative health, fighting health disparities and developing innovative community-based strategies for low-income and rural communities. As a rural family doctor serving poor communities, Dr. Benjamin has spent her career seeing the impact of healthcare disparities and the social determinants of health on several generations of patients in her community. She knows it’s well-documented and researched that your ZIP code is a better predictor of your health and longevity than your genetic code. As Surgeon General and founder and CEO of the Gulf States Health Policy Center, Dr. Benjamin has been the driving force behind research and policies to promote equity and access. Taking a public and population health perspective, she reviews the range of social determinants, ranging from income and education, racial disparities in black maternal health to the poor conditions of neighborhoods and recreational opportunities. Dr. Benjamin also explores practices and policies that will narrow the health gap.

As Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin made mental health a public health issue by integrating both mental health and suicide prevention into the first national prevention strategy. Dr. Benjamin continues to influence both national and regional health policy as an advocate for a preventative public health approach to mental health — treating it as a chronic disease and eliminating stigma. In this insightful talk, Dr. Benjamin discusses what we need to do to put mental health on an equal level with physical health, such as increasing access and integrating behavioral health and preventative mental health into primary care.  Combining her unique perspective as a policy maker, community practitioner and Surgeon General, she provides an achievable prescription for improving the mental health of our nation.

As Surgeon General, Dr. Benjamin not only de-stigmatized talking about suicide, she made suicide prevention a national priority. One of her proudest accomplishments as SG was to include suicide prevention in a national prevention strategy that put mental health on an equal level with physical health. Today, as both a practitioner and a policy maker, she continues to be a strong advocate for erasing stigma to prevent suicide and treating the “diseases of despair” that have become a national epidemic. Calling for suicide education that teaches everyone to recognize the warning signs of suicide, and ways to make it easier for those who are struggling to get help, Dr. Benjamin provides actionable solutions to one our nation’s most tragic public health issues.