“It’s innovative, it’s cutting-edge,” Richelle Clark, BSN, MHA, MBA, said of an exciting collaboration between on the St. Louis community and Washington University on issues around health.
Clark joined the Center for Community and Health Partnerships at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University one year ago as its co-director, after spending more than a decade leading health services for St. Louis Public Schools.
With the overall goal to reduce health disparities in the community, Clark reaches out to organizations to pursue common health goals, encourage research participation and find ways the university can support them in delivering evidence-based health care.
Clark said the center “is focusing on health issues related to disparities, as well as encouraging the community to participate in research around health disparities and health issues and concerns.”
Additionally, the center is also developing a speakers’ bureau for community requests for experts on health education, disparities and other topics. Her work extends to all six schools at the university.
“Any of the faculty – the professors, the researchers or even the student organization groups – that want to get involved with research with the community would come through this center,” Clark said.
Co-director Sarah Gehlert, PhD, from the Brown School of Social Work and the Department of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine, is the faculty liaison.
Clark said the center encourages the public “to think about some kind of health issue or health concern, particularly that falls under public health, and lets them know that we can support them.”
Next month, the center will hold its second Our Community, Our Health event, on Tuesday, May 6. The topic is obesity.
“We’re going to pull in some key community partners focusing on physical activity, food and nutrition, around tackling the concern around obesity,” Clark said. They will examine citywide and eventually countywide initiatives to address obesity.
The topic derived from general knowledge of the seriousness of the issue and a request from area churches.
“That will be the type of work that this center will do – encouraging churches and other kinds of organizations in the community who want to focus on a health issue, particularly a health disparity, to come to us so we can work together to provide what they want,” Clark said.
Clark built a 42-year career in public health as a nurse, a nurse practitioner and in health administration for the City of St. Louis Department of Health, St. Louis Regional Hospital, St. Louis ConnectCare and SLPS.
Of her current work, Clark said, “This would give me the opportunity to have a different kind of legacy of what I felt like I’ve done for the community around health.”
Clark was born in St. Louis. She and her family moved to Caruthersville in southeast Missouri during her first 10 years.
“Both of my parents were educators and because they were married, at that time, female teachers could not be married and work in St. Louis Public Schools,” Clark said.
She survived a tragic automobile accident in 1960 on the way back to Caruthersville from St. Louis that killed her little sister and injured Clark and her mother. Her experience recuperating at St. Louis Children’s Hospital is what prompted Clark to choose a nursing career.
“I’m in this hospital all by myself and my parents had to go back to Caruthersville to work and do whatever. I had family here that came to visit me and everything, but it was not quite the same,” Clark said. “But the nurses made me feel like I wasn’t all alone. So that’s when I decided I wanted to be a nurse.”
Clark said her family moved back to St. Louis when both parents were able to teach in SLPS.
Clark earned an executive MBA in health services management from Washington University, a master of science in health administration from Lindenwood College and a bachelor of science in nursing from University of Missouri-Columbia. She became a certified parent educator at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a pediatric nurse practitioner at Saint Louis University.
