Dr. Leana Wen is the Baltimore City Health Commissioner. An emergency physician and patient and community advocate, she leads the Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD), the oldest health department in the United States, formed in 1793. BCHD is an agency with a $130 million annual budget and 1,000 employees that aims to promote health and improve well-being through education, policy/advocacy, and direct service delivery. BCHD’s wide-ranging responsibilities include maternal and child health, youth wellness, school health, senior services, animal control, restaurant inspections, emergency preparedness, STI/HIV treatment, and acute and chronic disease prevention.

 

Since her appointment by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in January 2015, Dr. Wen has been reimagining the role of public health as being critical to all aspects of urban revitalization. Her transformative approach involves engaging hospitals and returning citizens in violence prevention; launching one of the most ambitious opioid overdose prevention programs in the country that is training every resident to save lives; and implementing a citywide youth health and wellness strategy. Following the civil unrest in April 2015, she directed Baltimore’s public health recovery efforts, including ensuring prescription medication access to seniors after the closure of over a dozen pharmacies and developing the Mental Health/Trauma Recovery Plan.

 

Most recently, Dr. Wen has been an attending physician and Director of Patient-Centered Care in the Department of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University (GWU). A professor of Emergency Medicine at the School of Medicine and of Health Policy at the School of Public Health, she co-directed GWU’s Residency Fellowship in Health Policy, co-led a new national collaboration on health policy and social mission with Kaiser Permanente, and served as founding director of Who’s My Doctor, a campaign calling for radical transparency in medicine.