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“More than a million people in Prince George’s County and Southern Maryland are finally going to get the health care that they deserve — which they so desperately need and that they have [needed] for so long,” Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) said at the Tuesday ceremony.

The University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of eight nationwide selected to participate in a quality improvement and training initiative supported by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and Susan G. Komen. The practices are in metropolitan areas Komen has targeted in its African American Health Equity Initiative, which aims to reduce breast cancer disparities in those areas where the disparities are greatest.

Debbie Fuller is a nurse navigator at the James M. Stockman Cancer Institute and also organized this year’s celebration. In previous years, the celebration was an all-day affair that brought cancer survivors together, whether they were currently battling the disease or had finished treatment.

Christine Crabbs, director of community health for Luminis, has overseen mobile vaccine clinics like the one set up Friday in partnership with Whose House? God’s House, a collective of predominantly Black churches dedicated to increasing the vaccination rate in the county’s Black community.

It’s been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic first arrived in Maryland. Local healthcare workers say these past 15 months have been an emotional whirlwind. TidalHealth Peninsula Regional was no exception to that. “The first three months were pretty challenging because we didn’t know what we had or what we were doing. We had a lot of folks passing and dying from the pandemic,” said Chief of the COVID-19 Response Team, Dr. Chris Snyder.

The hospital's CEO Sheldon Stein explained when the outpatient facility initially opened, MWPH was seeing about 5,000 outpatient visits per year. By the end of last year, the hospital's annual outpatient visits had surpassed 50,000. Stein said the hospital has long recognized that outpatient visits would continue to "take off" and that more care space would be needed to meet demand, but growth occurred even more quickly than expected.

Dr. Alexander Krupnick and his team from the University of Maryland Medical Center performed successful lung transplants on Micklus and another man.

The panelists – Del. Joseline Peña-Melnyk, Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, Dr. Mohan Suntha, and Brian Pieninck, CEO of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield – shared perspectives from all corners of Maryland’s health systems on centering health equity in state policies.

Miller is a language services advocate at Meritus. She said she's been working in the hospital's patient advocacy department for about 18 months. Much of her work involves translation services for those who do not speak English or have limited proficiency in the language.

Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker, a forensic pathologist, worked at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, a hospital just outside the Baltimore city limits, and as an expert in courtrooms across the country. He opened the Rape Care Center within the hospital, a unit dedicated to doing better for the traumatized women who wound up there. He trained physicians on how to conduct respectful but meticulous exams and how to preserve the evidence of a possible crime.