Urban Hospitals and Poverty

Surrounded by poverty, urban hospitals reach out, By Michael Ollove, October 12, 2015, Stateline: “As a child, Bishop Douglas Miles heard the warnings about vans trolling East Baltimore streets, snatching up young African-Americans for medical experiments at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. Whether there was any truth behind those stories—Hopkins has always denied them—hardly mattered. The mythology lived on and, combined with the hospital’s very real development decisions, contributed to a persistent view of Hopkins as an imperious, menacing presence amid the largely poor and African-American neighborhoods surrounding it.  ‘Hopkins was viewed with a great deal of suspicion and anger,’ said Miles, who graduated from the school in 1970 and is the bishop of Koinonia Baptist Church in northeast Baltimore. But now, Miles says, that perception could be changing. Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins hospital and health system have launched an ambitious initiative to fill many more jobs with residents from distressed Baltimore neighborhoods, boost the use of minority contractors and vendors from those areas, and require their partners to follow their lead…”