Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with Dr. Basola Ojikutu, the Health Commissioner of Boston, Massachusetts. We

discuss her shift during the pandemic, from supporting community coalitions directly to then

leading the health department to find new ways to partner with communities within the city.

Let's listen. Dr. Bissola Ocicutu, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

Now, you have been the Boston Health Commissioner for how long?

I was appointed in July of 2021.

So that's sort of when I started working on things.

But then I officially, officially start in September. And then I joined mayor-woo's cabinet in November after she was elected.

So you have been around for about 18 months across two different mayors.

Yes.

So we've talked to some public health commissioners on this podcast who took the job well before COVID and then just, you know, got hit by a pandemic and just described the scramble that that required.

You took the job during COVID. Why did you do that?

Well, quite honestly, I had been working with some of our strongest, I call them our strongest community-based organizations during COVID.

And really felt, you know, an intense sense that we needed to continue to mobilize the work and

that we needed leadership in place that valued their work. And the job was offered, actually,

it had been offered well before I actually decided to take it, but I really felt like it was

the right time. I knew that this was, there was, it was sort of, I don't know, a title wave of,

you know, community events and community engagement that was happening at the time. And it just,

...